“Oh, do not worry about your friend. Nick Baron is likely already dead. You will join him, but it doesn’t have to hurt. Please, Drake, sit down. Don’t you find me desirable?” She took another step toward him.
Drake lifted the stool and held it out in front of him like a drunken lion tamer. “Stay away from me, lady. You’re not my type.”
“Fine. Have it your way.” Chaya grabbed a leg of the stool and pulled with alarming strength, yanking Drake closer and swiping at his arm with the knife. He let go and jerked away in time to avoid the tip. Where was that gun?
He had no time to search. Chaya stepped in and swung the stool, breaking it across his shoulder and knocking him into the bar before lunging with the knife again.
Despite the opiates in his system, Drake was beginning to learn her rhythm. His left hand had fallen on a silver bowl and he pushed himself off the bar and swung it hard, connecting with her face. She reeled back with an angry scream, her hand over her nose. When she pulled the hand away, her face was bloody, her nose gashed and twisted sideways.
“Ugh,” said Drake, wobbling forward and dropping the bowl. “You weren’t my type before, but now you’re ugly too.”
“Ooh!” Chaya rushed at him, slashing the knife back and forth in an X pattern.
The bobby’s gear lay on a table within arm’s reach. Drake snatched up the utility belt and flung it at her head. It hardly slowed her at all, but the move was just a distraction. As the belt left his hand, Drake drew the baton from its holster.
He met her slash with an upward swing, whacking her hard across the forearm. There was a sickening crack of breaking bone.
Chaya cried out in pain, but she held on to her knife. As Drake wheeled her damaged arm farther upward with the baton, she pirouetted to his left and switched her weapon to her good hand, swinging the blade down and back at his kidney.
It was a gorgeous move, but he saw it coming. He caught her forearm with an iron grip and slashed down at her ankles with the baton. There was another horrible crack. Chaya cried out again and both of them fell to the floor, wrapped like lovers in a spoon. He held her tight while she struggled against him for another second. Then she was still.
After several moments, Drake cautiously let go with one hand and placed two fingers on Chaya’s neck. She had no pulse. He struggled to his feet, leaving her lying on her side, and stumbled over to a window to push it open wide. The toxic incense that filled the room began to clear.
The knife remained embedded in Chaya’s abdomen and seeping blood darkened her silk pajamas, but a wound that low on her torso should not have killed her. Then Drake recalled something he once read about the ancient Hashashin. They favored poison blades. He glanced down at the hole in his shirt. How many times during the fight had she almost nicked him?
After a few more breaths of fresh air, he knelt down to get a closer look at the body, searching for a Hashashin tattoo. Her forearms were clean, her palms as well. Then he noticed a black mark at the back of her neck. He gently brushed her hair aside. There it was, a small circle like Kattan’s and Ashaq’s. The symbol inside was a horizontal crescent moon.
Someone pounded on the door and Drake jerked his head up. His eyes darted around the room. Broken furniture, wine and blood staining the carpet, a dead woman lying on the floor as delicate and defenseless as a broken rose. This didn’t look like self-defense.
The intruder pounded again. “Miss Maharani? Open up! We received a tip that you may be in danger from the escaped terrorists.”
CHAPTER 45
Baron!”
Walker’s booming intrusion on the comm link nearly cost Nick his grip on the drainpipe. He winced and tucked his body closer to the cold metal. “Yes, sir?”
“I’ve been tracking you since you left Scotland Yard. What are you doing?”
Nick glanced down at the cobblestones twenty feet below. “You know . . . just . . . hanging around.”
“Well, quit it. Gather your team and get out of Dodge. You’re done.”
“Say again?”
“This is no longer a covert fight. It’s gone public—very public.”
“You mean the incident in Paternoster Square?” asked Nick, sliding down the last section of pipe. He backed into a doorway to get out of the freezing sleet.
“Worse. I mean Senator Cartwright. One of his people bullied his way into CJ’s files. Before she cut him off, he found out that the DC bomber called himself the first sign. He called a press conference and broadcast that information on live TV, linking the two attacks. He told the public that more signs are on their way.”
“Can’t CJ lock him up for releasing classified information?” As he asked the question, Nick turned and peered through the glass pane of the door he had backed into. The place looked like a pastry shop. It was closed and dark, but he saw a coatrack behind the register with a sweatshirt and a wool cap.
“Nothing’s illegal for our national politicians,” grumbled Walker. “You should know that by now.”
Nick gritted his teeth and smashed the pane with his bare elbow.
“Did I hear glass breaking?”
“No.” Nick reached through and unlocked the door. “You can’t pull my team, sir. I’m the only one with a direct line to Kattan. We just need a little more time.”
“Your direct line has been cut, Baron. Or haven’t you noticed?”
“I don’t follow.”
“The stakeout at the café in DC paid off. CJ found Kattan’s phone. No henchman, just the phone. It was buried in the bushes outside the café, transmitting the moves on its own.”
Nick pulled the sweatshirt over his head. It was far too big—the owner must weigh four hundred pounds—but it was better than freezing. “You mean Kattan used it to retransmit the moves?”
“Negative. The receiver was disabled. There was no active connection to Kattan.” The colonel went on to explain that the phone had simply transmitted a list of moves at predetermined times. Kattan had laid out the game in advance, predicting every move Nick made.
“He’s not that good,” argued Nick. “No one is.”
“My evidence says different.”
“What you’re saying is impossible, sir. I’ve still got him on the line. Earlier today he put me in check with his queen. During the ride to Cannon Street, I took her out with my remaining knight. I’m waiting for his response.”
“You won’t get a response. CJ has the phone. There were no more moves in the hopper. That’s it. Game over.”
No. Nick suddenly felt an urgent need to pick up his pace. He grabbed the wool cap off the rack, pulling it down over his ears as he rushed out from behind the register. “Kattan had me in check, not checkmate. I escaped. I can still get to him.” He yanked open the door to the street.
“Nick, stop.”
At the colonel’s use of his first name, Nick froze. His hand fell away from the handle. The door swung closed again.
“This chase is over.” Walker’s voice carried a trace of unusual sympathy. “There are no more moves in the sequence. You were never meant to finish the game. Kattan presented you with a grand gambit, and you walked right in. We all did.”
Nick pinched the bridge of his nose in a long wince. His head was pounding, the pain that results from coming in out of the cold. “It can’t all have been for nothing.”
“Oh, it wasn’t for nothing.” Walker’s tone hardened again. “Kattan designed this whole charade to bury the Triple Seven Chase, to keep us out of the way for whatever he has planned next. And he succeeded. The president is putting us on the bench and giving the search for the bioweapon over to the big agencies.” Walker sighed into the comm link. “Come home, Nightmare One. Lighthouse out.”
CHAPTER 46
Nick pressed his hands into the pockets of his oversized sweatshirt and stepped out once more into the night and the freezing sle
et. To the right of the pastry shop, a dark tunnel passed beneath the solid foundation of the railway bridge. To the left, the cobblestone street stretched away until it curved into shadow. Iron lamps hung at sparse intervals from looming three- and four-story Victorian houses on either side, their copper-brick faces pressed together to form a long, unbroken passage. Nick felt as if he had dropped onto one of the darker pages of Dickens.
“Nightmare Two,” he called, plodding forward through the puddles of orange lamplight.
Drake did not respond.
“Two, come in. I shook off the cops. I need you and Chaya to pick me up.”
“I can’t raise him either,” complained Scott, still listening on the link. “You sent him home with a beautiful woman. You do the math.”
“Fine. Come pick me up, and then we’ll get Casanova and head straight to the airport. Ditch what you can and pack up the weapons and electronics. Leave out only what you need to do a little software analysis on the plane.”
“Exactly what kind of analysis?”
“We took a thumb drive from Scotland Yard that may contain the Second Sign Virus. I want you to identify the creator or the source code and forward it to CJ. Our job now is to help the FBI.”
“Can’t do it,” said the engineer flatly.
“You can and you will,” growled Nick, starting to boil. “This is the only lead we have left.”
“I mean I can’t do it on the plane. You’re talking about a monster virus, the likes of which the world has never seen. You don’t just shove that into a SATCOM-capable laptop in the field. Things start going bad very quickly. I have to get the drive back to Romeo Seven if I’m going to exploit it.”
Nick relented. He knew the engineer was right. “Then we’ll have to fly fast.”
“Where do I meet you?”
“You have a map. You tell me.”
“Okay. Uh . . . there’s a ship—the Golden Hinde—two blocks east. A boat in a square, you can’t miss it.”
The whine of a motorcycle interrupted the conversation, echoing through the brickwork canyon. Nick tarried between islands of lamplight and listened.
“Did you copy, Nightmare One?”
“Yeah. Got it. The Golden Hinde.” The engine noise grew louder. The motorcycle was heading Nick’s way.
“I have to go off-line while I transfer SATCOM control to Romeo Seven and pack up,” continued the engineer.
Nick nodded slowly, as though Scott could see him, but his attention was fixed on the light from the motorcycle’s headlamp, growing around the bend. An icy chill swept through him, despite the protection of his stolen sweatshirt.
“Four?”
“Yes?”
“Hurry up.”
CHAPTER 47
A few seconds after Scott signed off, the motorcycle appeared, the rider dressed all in black. As he sped past, he turned his head and locked his gaze on Nick. Then he gunned the motor, continuing into the tunnel beneath the bridge.
Nick let out a long breath, but then he heard tires skidding to a stop. The engine idled on the other side of the tunnel for half a beat and then revved up again. Nick broke into a run.
The long brick canyon was a perfect kill zone, with few exits left or right. A side street broke off to the left thirty meters ahead, but Nick would never make it that far. The motorcycle was closing too fast.
Closer, only a few paces away, he saw a narrow archway blocked by an iron gate. He committed, twisting around to face the attacker and pressing his shoulder through the iron bars up to his chest. They had looked wide enough.
They were not.
The big sweatshirt caught and bunched up, making Nick too fat to squeeze through. He pushed with everything he had and the fabric started to give, but at an agonizingly slow rate. He looked up. The rider steadied his bike and took one hand off the handlebar to raise a suppressed submachine gun.
A fraction of a second later, Nick fell through the bars amid a ripple of clangs and a shower of sparks. He scrambled forward into the gloom, smacked into a brick wall, and turned. Then he smacked into another wall and turned again. He had stumbled into a maze of passages between the two-hundred-year-old buildings of London’s wharf prison district. New structures had been constructed over the top, roofing in the alleyways and leaving them in total darkness.
Another round of clangs sounded from the gate, followed by a heavy crash as the rider broke through. The throbbing buzz of the motorcycle bounced off the brick walls, and Nick could not tell which direction it was coming from. He pressed his back against a wall at a T-intersection and looked from side to side until he saw a faint white light grow and then fade in the alley straight ahead. Almost instantly it grew and faded again in an intersecting alley to the left, and then—though it seemed impossible—again on the opposite side. The third time it kept growing until the rider appeared at the corner. The black helmet turned. The visor was up. The assassin’s eyes fixed on Nick.
As the rider steered into the alley and fired, Nick dove down the passage straight ahead. A stream of bullets whizzed by, the shots muted down to a series of clacks by the weapon’s compact suppressor. But this series ended in a premature click.
Nick spun back into the T-intersection and rushed the oncoming headlight.
The rider accepted the challenge. He let his empty weapon hang at his side and bore down on the accelerator, racing toward Nick in a lopsided game of chicken. At the last millisecond, Nick reached his goal, a small alcove between them. He sprang left into the doorway and twisted, throwing all his body weight behind a left hook to the side of the rider’s helmet as he passed.
The assassin’s head bounced off the brick wall. His bike wobbled with increasing oscillation until the front tire cranked ninety degrees and he went flying over the bars, tumbling into a heap. The bike stayed wedged between the walls with the cracked headlight still on, reflecting off the copper-colored brick.
Nick climbed over the bike, trying to get to the assassin before he reloaded his gun, but the rider didn’t bother. He jumped to his feet, tore off his helmet, and squared off, drawing a long, curving knife from a sheath at his back.
Nick hesitated. Then he remembered the Hashashin knife he had carried since Istanbul. As soon as his feet hit the ground on the other side of the bike, he pulled it from his pocket and palmed the hilt. The two blades sang as they shot out. The Hashashin glanced down at the knife and then grinned. With a gloved hand, he beckoned Nick forward.
CHAPTER 48
At Nick’s first step, the wall beside him erupted in a cloud of dust and brick fragments, forcing him back into the broken bike. Blinding light shone from the alley to his right. Another engine revved.
There was a second assassin.
He let his blades retract and half-fell, half-clambered backward over the bike. In the scramble, he saw that the first rider had dropped his weapon. A Kriss Vector submachine gun hung from the handle bars. He snatched it up. The gun was empty, but there was no point in leaving it there for the assassin to recover.
Nick dodged left at an L-intersection and paused to get his bearings. The illumination from the headlamp of the broken bike became his reference point. What seemed an endless maze in the dark now proved to be just a few intersecting corridors, bounded on four sides by two short passages and two long. Somewhere along those border passages was the way out.
As he rounded the corner to the next long passage, Nick saw a flash of steel. The unhorsed assassin slashed at his head while the other rider approached at increasing speed from behind him. Nick ducked the knife and struck out with his own, unleashing the spring-loaded blades as he slashed at his attacker’s midsection. His knife cut easily through the leather riding jacket, but it scraped against something the tip could not penetrate. Kevlar. The assassin reversed his swing, slicing back down at Nick’s head, and Nick countered with an upward thrust of his own. He embedd
ed his blade in the assassin’s forearm. No Kevlar there.
He jerked the blade, ripping muscle and nerves and forcing the assassin to drop his knife. With his other hand, Nick grabbed the man’s belt, and before the assassin could push away, he found what he needed—a pair of magazines. There was a shout from behind. The wounded assassin ducked. Nick spun back around the corner as more rounds pelted the wall behind him.
He backed down the short passage that capped the end of the maze. There were only two approaches to this position, from the main passages to the north and south. The faded light from the fallen bike illuminated the passage to the north. The bright light and the revving motor of the other filled the passage to the south.
“Nightmare One, you up?”
Nick couldn’t believe the timing. “Two? Where have you been?”
“You know. Wine, incense, beautiful Hashashin queen with a poison knife and a powerful comm jammer. Chaya tried to kill me.”
“Was she in her underwear when it went down?”
“Close.”
“Figures.”
“So what’s up with you?”
The other assassin kept revving his engine, but he did not breach the corner. Nick heard low voices in the same Turkic dialect he had heard in the catacombs. He wished he could understand the words. Then the voices stopped. “Two not-very-pretty and fully-clothed assassins are trying to carve me up with knives and Vector submachine guns,” he told Drake. “At least there’s no incense. Can you get to me?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. I’m pinned down in Chaya’s neighborhood. Scotland Yard stormed the flat, and I had to bolt through the window. I might need a hot pickup.”
Nick heard the scuff of a boot from the intersection behind him. He turned and fired to the north and the attacker retreated. At the same time, he sensed a shift in the light from the south. One of the assassins had passed in front of the headlight of the other bike. He tensed. The move to the north was a distraction, meant to turn him away from the real threat, and it had worked.
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