Ahead of Nick, the bloodred carpet of the Al-Aqsa prayer room was clear, all the way to the door.
“What are you waiting for?” grunted Drake through the SATCOM.
Nick didn’t argue. He made one last, unsuccessful attempt to catch a glimpse of his best friend through the mob, and then bolted for the door.
CHAPTER 75
Four more Palestinians pushed through the tall green doors of the mosque right before Nick reached them. One of them took a swing. Nick ducked left and came up throwing a hook. He dropped the man to the floor in one punch. He took the next one down with an elbow to the temple and then ducked the other two and made it into open air.
Confusion was settling in. The crowd was beginning to notice the disturbance. Palestinians filtered out from the tourists and headed for the mosque. Nick was surrounded, but the group was thin, nothing like what Drake was facing inside.
Nick also had help.
Long experience had prepared the Israelis for trouble on the Temple Mount during a big event like the eclipse. They were ready. Police in riot gear rushed out of a tent to Nick’s left. He fought his way toward them. One Palestinian made the mistake of bear-hugging Nick from behind, trying to throw him down. He bought himself a head butt to the nose and a quick trip to the stone beneath the feet of his friends. Two more quickly followed, grabbing at Nick’s IDF uniform. He pulled one man’s head to his knee and heard the nasty crack of a jaw breaking. The other one got an arm around Nick’s throat, but then a black baton flashed over Nick’s head. There was an ugly thock and the arm went slack. The Israelis pulled Nick past the riot line to safety. Several patted him on the shoulders as he stumbled through, assuming he was one of the regular Temple Mount police group. Nick shouted that there was an American tourist trapped inside and kept going.
Unfortunately, the troops would not likely be much help to Drake. In the crazy world of the Temple Mount, the Israeli police were not permitted inside the mosques. Their few breaches of this protocol in the past had created massive riots all over the West Bank. The police could only set up a perimeter on the outside to protect the civilians on the plaza. In that capacity, always with unnatural patience and discipline, they had often faced rocks and Molotov cocktails thrown from the entrance of the mosque.
As he left the police line, Nick searched for the target, but a wall of sun-watchers crowding north to get away from the riot blocked his view. He could see the SWARM above them, though. The drones were drifting north. The Hashashin was on the move again.
Nick saw two men in green uniforms pushing toward him through the crowd, and he suddenly realized what the terrorist had been waiting for. The riot had lured the Islamic Waqf Authority guards away from their post in front of the Dome of the Rock. They would have stopped the target at the entrance to search his big backpack. Now they were out of the way, heading south for their customary harassment of the Israelis forming around Al-Aqsa. Nick winced. Once again, his team had become one of the dominoes in Kattan’s string of outcomes. Unbelievable.
In his earpiece, he could still hear Drake being pummeled, grunting with pain and occasionally making a snide remark that his attackers couldn’t understand.
“Hurry!” pleaded Molly. Nick could hear the tears in her voice. “Get the nuke so you can help him!”
“Working on it.” Nick shouldered his way north through the crowd and slid into the narrow cypress grove that bordered the Dome of the Rock platform. He finally saw the Hashashin again, almost to the unguarded entrance of the mosque. In the cover of the trees, he drew his suppressed Sig Sauer pistol. He could end this right now and go back to save Drake. He lined the Hashashin up in his sights.
The moment Nick pulled the trigger, a group of civilians passed between him and the terrorist. He jerked the weapon up but it still spit out a round. A puff of dust erupted from the side of the mosque as the bullet obliterated a patch of five-hundred-year-old ceramic tile. With the noise of the riot, no one noticed.
By the time the tourists passed, the target had disappeared again. The SWARM hovered over the great gold dome.
There was a terrible crack in Nick’s earpiece. Drake let out a pained cry and then his SATCOM went totally dead.
“Drake? Molly?”
No response from either.
Nick’s phone chimed. He risked a glance at the screen.
TheEmissary has taken your second knight and put you in check. Your move.
Nick growled as he put the phone away. He vaulted up onto the platform. This game was over.
A paper sign irreverently duct-taped to the mosque’s great wooden door said CLOSED FOR CELESTIAL EVENT BY ORDER OF THE WAQF AUTHORITY in three languages. Nick held his pistol tight against his chest, pulled open the heavy door, and slipped inside. Blood stained the rich green carpet just beyond the marble entrance. A third Waqf Authority guard listed to one side in his chair, a bullet hole in his head.
Nick quietly pressed deeper into the octagonal mosque. Two circles of gray-and-white columns interspersed with five-foot-long partitions formed a maze of marble around the sacred Foundation Stone at the center. They offered a good deal of cover, but they obscured his line of sight to the Hashashin.
The great rock itself jutted four feet above the floor and was surrounded by a four-foot-tall wood-and-marble fence. Above it rose the massive dome, inlaid with dizzying floral patterns in green and blue and thousands of pounds of pure gold, barely lit by a few chandeliers and the darkening sunlight seeping through blue stained-glass windows.
Creeping up behind one of the rounded partitions, Nick got eyes on the terrorist, kneeling on the Foundation Stone with a semi-automatic in his left hand. A metal suitcase lay open in front of him.
To Nick’s surprise, it was not Kattan. No matter. This guy had the nuke. Nick could find Kattan and the vaccine later. He leveled his weapon and was about to fire when he noticed a remote trigger in the terrorist’s right hand—a black oval with a red trigger underneath, no bigger than a presentation remote. Nick lowered the Sig. In the throes of death, the Hashashin might still trigger the bomb.
Nick stuffed his gun behind his back and rushed forward from the inner ring, his footsteps muted by the thick carpet. He ran in a crouch, planning to spring up and knock the trigger away.
The Hashashin stood and turned just as Nick’s feet left the carpet. Nick knocked the remote from his hand, but the terrorist caught his shoulders and threw him down on the rock. He let out a pained “Oof!” as the air left his lungs. The remote skipped across the carpet, coming to rest at the base of a marble column.
Nick took too long to recover from the fall. The Hashashin lifted him off the rock by his lapels, and before he got his hands up, the terrorist landed a cruel punch straight to his teeth.
“Infidel!” he shouted. “You cannot stop this. The signs have been cast. The Emissary has spoken.”
“Your Emissary is a con man,” retorted Nick, spitting out blood with the words. He rolled onto his side and kicked his top leg, sweeping the Hashashin’s feet out from underneath him, bringing him crashing down onto the Foundation Stone. Then he scrambled on top and landed a counterblow to the man’s face, bloodying the terrorist’s lip to match his own.
The Hashashin swung up with a right, but Nick caught his arm and swept it across his body, sprawling his knees back and pressing down with all his weight to pin both of the terrorist’s arms to his chest. Their bloodied faces were inches apart. Nick slowly raked his forearm across the man’s jugular. The Hashashin coughed. His eyes bulged and he started to turn purple.
Nick put even more weight on the forearm. “You’re not going to detonate any nukes today. Now, where’s your boss?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw a man in an Israeli police uniform approaching. He leveled a submachine gun at them both.
“Don’t!” Nick shouted, but the policeman pulled the trigger. Nick jerked up an
d shielded his face as the Israeli riddled his captive with bullets.
The light beneath the dome grew another shade darker. The Hashashin coughed and gurgled and then went silent, staring sightlessly up at the rich gold above.
Nick slowly stood, raising his hands. “Easy, buddy, I’m not your enemy.”
“How can you say that?” asked the policeman. Then he pulled the trigger again.
CHAPTER 76
The policeman fired a burst of three bullets. Two slammed into Nick’s vest and one caught him in the right clavicle just above it, sending him reeling backward. He tripped over the barrier surrounding the Foundation Stone and fell to the floor.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” muttered the policeman, walking around the stone. He kept the weapon leveled.
Tendrils of wicked pain radiated outward from the wound, lighting Nick’s neck and chest on fire. He could sense loose bone fragments floating around as he struggled to his feet. “The case,” he breathed, holding his hands up to keep from getting shot again. “It’s a nuclear bomb. Get a team in here to contain it. And tell the men outside to breach the Al-Aqsa mosque. I have a man in there.”
“I have a man in there too. Yours is dead,” said the policeman. The man’s accent was hard to peg, New England maybe, with a trace of Gulf Arab. He backed up to the first ring of marble columns, keeping his weapon trained on Nick while he knelt down and picked up the remote trigger. “That is your problem, Nick Baron. You are completely unwilling to sacrifice your pieces.” The man nodded at the corpse still bleeding out on the sacred rock. “Me? I don’t suffer that deficiency. I treat my pieces the way they were meant to be treated—disposable.”
“Your pieces?” Nick muttered. He tried to focus through the pain, squinting at the face in the shadow of the ball cap. In the dim light of the mosque he had not recognized his primary target. “Kattan.”
The young man took off his police cap and tossed it aside. “Good. Very good. You remember. That means you remember taking my father from me.” Kattan abruptly stepped to one of the marble partitions and dragged Kurt Baron into view, bound and gagged. “And now I will take yours.”
Nick lurched forward, but Kattan shot a burst at the carpet in front of him, sending ricochets into the sacred stone and forcing him back. His father tried to shout through his gag, but the effort only resulted in a fit of coughing.
The terrorist approached, motioning Nick aside with the weapon, and the two circled each other until Kattan reached the Foundation Stone. He pulled his bound captive up onto the rock and stood over the nuke and the dead Hashashin.
“You played well, Nick Baron,” he said with a gracious smile. “But you played exactly as I steered you.” He raised his eyebrows. “Did you really think that you would outsmart me by not going to Cairo? I didn’t want you there. I wanted you here, with me at the very end. And here you are.” He spread his arms—gun, remote nuclear trigger, and all—and bowed.
“If you wanted me here,” said Nick, stalling for time, “then why did your men try to kill me in London?”
“Kill you?” Kattan rocked back with laughter. “To steal a line from Hollywood, if I had wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. Those little distractions were just meant to keep you in the game, and they did, at least until a few minutes ago.” He shook the gun at Nick with his severed arm. “You are a poor sport. Like a petulant child upending the board, you refused to make your last move in our little game.”
“I was never in this for the game.”
“Liar!” shouted Kattan, his voice echoing beneath the dome. “I have seen your life, Nick Baron! I have studied you for years! Whether by guns or planes or little wooden pieces, you live to play the game, and I kept you in it! I allowed you to survive this long and you repaid me by quitting the board.” He turned the machine gun toward Nick’s dad. “I sent you a move a few minutes ago after my man killed your partner. Pull out your phone, now. Make your countermove. Finish the game.”
“No. This is absurd.”
Nick’s response infuriated the terrorist. He shoved the machine gun into Kurt’s chest. “Do it!”
“Okay, okay.” Nick held out his hands to settle Kattan down. “Take it easy.” He pulled out his phone and opened the chess app. Kattan had only left him one move to get out of check, taking a rook with his king, exposing his own bishop. He pressed enter and then pocketed his phone once more.
They stared at each other in silence for several seconds, Kattan’s weapon still pressed into Kurt’s chest, until a chime sounded from the terrorist’s pocket. The move had been received. He did not bother to pull out the phone. He lifted his eyes blissfully to the ceiling and quietly breathed, “Thank you,” and then pulled the machine gun’s trigger.
Nick’s dad grunted through his gag and dropped to his knees.
“Dad!” In a rage, Nick drew the Sig from behind his back, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, but Kattan pivoted and fired again. One bullet seared Nick’s finger below the trigger guard. Another sparked off the suppressor, knocking the weapon away. It clumped onto the floor behind him. Nick growled and pulled his stinging hand to his chest.
“The same abilities that allow me to dominate you on the chess board also give me superior reflexes, Nick. It’s all part of the same package. You cannot outthink me, and you cannot outshoot me. Stand down.”
The natural light in the lattice windows was almost gone. Kattan looked up at the dome, watching the shadow inside it grow. “I will let you observe your father’s final moments. More courtesy than I was given. Then you and I will complete our game. We will die together on this sacrificial stone, and the apocalypse that rises from it will heal the world of the ills your kind and my father’s kind created.”
CHAPTER 77
Kurt’s eyes pleaded with his son as he collapsed onto his side next to the dead Hashashin. He had taken three rounds to the right side of his chest. Blood soaked his shirt and trickled down onto the Foundation Stone.
“At least let me go to him,” said Nick, taking a step forward.
Kattan thrust his gun out. “Ah, ah, ah. I have been more than generous already. Stay where you are.”
Nick kept his distance, but he circled, looking for an opportunity. “You have your revenge. You can kill us and walk away. Why DC? Why Jerusalem? You’re not one of these Hashashin fanatics.”
“Hashashin fanatics? Really?” Kattan chuckled. “You are the one racing around the world, killing, destroying lives, all in the name of a fallen power that still believes it governs the world by divine right. Who are you to call them fanatics?”
“A hundred thousand Israelis and tourists, ten thousand Americans,” said Nick, still circling. He shot a glance at his dad. Kurt was propped up on his left elbow, following his son with his eyes, but they were losing focus. He was fading. His pooling blood mixed with the blood of the Hashashin to form a dark red river that snaked through the contours of the Foundation Stone. Nick looked back up at Kattan. “Do you really believe that killing them and blowing up that rock you’re standing on will bring your Mahdi and some kind of paradise?”
“Stop!” shouted Kattan, raising the remote trigger.
Nick froze.
The terrorist’s voice calmed again and he tilted his head. “Pardon the outburst, but your attempt to off-balance me is both obvious and annoying. I bid you stand still.”
Nick nodded slowly and lifted his hands again.
“Messiah, Mahdi, they are all the same,” continued the terrorist. “Archaic nonsense that has cost the lives of millions and plagued our world with constant conflict. Don’t you see, Nick? There is no God, no paradise.” He stamped the sacred stone with his boot. “This is just a rock. But the world . . . wants . . . Armageddon.” He shook the bomb trigger to emphasize each word and then dropped it to his side and looked up into the dome. “I will give it to them. And when the smoke clears and the sun emerges from the shadow
of the black moon, you and I and a hundred thousand others will be dead, and then what?” He shrugged. “The world will go on. But they will go on in the realization that Armageddon has passed and no messiah and no Mahdi came to save them from their miserable existence.”
Kattan took a deep breath through his nostrils and smiled as if the air were suddenly clean. “The delusions that pollute this world will collapse and all will see that every religion is false. The crusades and the jihads will finally end.”
Nick shook his head. “When the smoke clears, the world will rebuild their churches. The masses will keep watching for the messiah. You can’t destroy faith that easily.”
Kurt moaned and Nick’s eyes dropped to his father in time to watch his head droop back. His elbow slipped from under him and he collapsed onto the Foundation Stone. Nick rushed forward but Kattan stamped his foot again, shouting, “No! I already told you, no!”
Nick stopped, closer than before but still too far to strike.
“Let me explain how the endgame has gone,” said Kattan, calming himself. “Your last knight is dead, taken by my man in the mosque, and your final move exposed your last bishop.” He viciously kicked Kurt’s unmoving form. “And so, I have taken him too.”
Nick’s phone gave its dreadful chime, announcing its receipt of the final move of the game.
Above them, the last trace of sunlight vanished from the lattice windows. Kattan looked up and nodded his approval at the completeness of the shadow that filled the dome. He smiled down at Nick. “You have a message. Go ahead. See what it says.”
Shadow Maker Page 30
