Author: James R. Hannibal
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/james-r-hannibal/page,10,59578-shadow_maker.html
Drake snorted. “We can handle them.”
Hadad shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Perhaps.”
Nick stared down at the knife, the beautiful inlays, the strange, dark alloy behind them. “Hadad, if the Hashashin have been in hiding for eight hundred years, why would they surface now?”
“Only one reason.” The old man stood, sweeping a couple of halva wafers from the plate as he stepped around the table. “Armageddon is approaching.” Then he melted away into the passing crowd.
CHAPTER 21
Cairo, Egypt
The Emissary smoothed out his white hooded robe and shifted his hands behind his back, clasping the lifeless prosthetic fingers as if they were real. In this pose he gazed across the Nile from the window of a forgotten watchtower, considering the thousand minarets of Cairo. He admired their workmanship. Each one was beautiful, unique. And like the mosques below them, each would soon become entirely meaningless.
The time of the true Qiyamah rapidly approached. The time long predicted by Ismaili scholars when mankind would join together in enlightenment, and these places of both worship and segregation would become merely architectural curiosities. But the advent of the Qiyamah required a purge. Looking out from the watchtower, the Emissary could see the path to Armageddon in a whirling, winding pattern of outcomes as complex as the motifs that adorned those many minarets. That was his gift—to see events unfold before their time, to shape them as he saw fit, to use them to draw an opponent to destruction.
Armageddon would bring both global peace and personal justice. The man who had stripped the Emissary of the one thing he cared for would now be stripped of everything he loved, piece by piece, outcome after outcome. The dominoes would fall one by one, bringing Nick Baron’s world crashing down around him, until he was left in the same state he had left the Emissary—utterly alone.
Then the two of them would die together.
The Emissary withdrew from his vision and turned expectantly to face the open archway to the tower’s spiral staircase. A half second later, a young Syrian appeared. Kateb, the assistant security clerk from the Latakia weapons storage facility, entered the room carrying a brown leather satchel.
“Ya Sheikh,” said Kateb, offering a short bow. “I have brought the item you . . .” The clerk’s voice faded. His eyes fixed on an old wooden desk in the corner of the room where a white-haired Pakistani busily soldered electronics together. A shiny metal box on the edge of the desk was marked with a yellow-and-black radiation-hazard label.
The Emissary smiled reassuringly. “Do not worry, young man. The material is quite safe in its present form.” He gestured toward the man at the desk. “Dr. Wahish has assured me so.”
Before Kateb could respond, another man entered the room, this one carrying a green canvas backpack. He stepped around the security clerk and silently approached the Emissary. The newcomer wore the practical attire of a desert traveler—a brown vest and a tan shirt over loose-fitting olive pants, a black and tan shemagh scarf around his neck. There was a curved knife in a simple leather sheath tucked into the sash around his middle. When the Emissary nodded, he set the backpack down and withdrew a metal box marked LITHIUM-6.
“Excellent, Amran.” The Emissary took the box and motioned his lieutenant aside. “Dr. Wahish?”
Without a word, the Pakistani doctor rose from the desk and unfurled a six-foot roll of plastic sheeting onto the floor. He set the box of lithium-6 on the sheet and opened it. Inside, there were a number of soft silver chunks of metal, suspended in mineral oil. The doctor used a pair of tongs to transfer two small chunks into a metal cylinder the size of a 35-millimeter-film canister, spilling only a few drops of oil on the plastic. Then he closed both containers. He put the box on his desk, a good distance from the box with the radiation-hazard label, and then handed the small cylinder to the Emissary and returned to his work.
Kateb watched all of this with mild interest, patiently waiting his turn. When all was complete, the Emissary signaled for him to come forward. He approached, unconcerned that he was now standing on the plastic sheet. “Ya Sheikh,” said the clerk, bowing as if starting a rehearsed scene over again, “I have brought the item you requested.”
When the Emissary said nothing, Kateb hesitated, unsure of himself, and then handed over the satchel.
The Emissary opened the flap and checked the thermos-sized cylinder inside. Satisfied, he slipped his small canister of lithium-6 into the bag with it and lifted the strap over his head, letting it settle at his side. He smiled at Kateb and gave an almost imperceptible nod.
In the awkward silence, Kateb shifted his weight from one heel to the other. “Ya Sheikh, about my payment.” The clerk did not see Kattan’s lieutenant slip around behind him, or hear him draw the knife from its sheath.
CHAPTER 22
Romeo Seven, Joint Base Andrews
South of Washington, DC
Dr. Patricia Heldner sat at her computer, reading data bursts from the airborne team watching over Quinn during his transport back to the states. She started typing a response to one of them when she heard a gentle rap on her office doorframe.
“Yes, Dick?” she said, still typing. She did not have to look up. She recognized the knock. It was the knock of a man who entered every office in this bunker with a loud, boorish comment or the pound of his fist against the frame—every office but hers. Pat and Walker knew each other too well for him to wear that facade around her. Now in her late forties, Heldner had played doctor and team mom for Dick’s operations long before the Triple Seven came into being. She knew all his secrets, and he knew hers—like the fact that not all of her shoulder-length red hair was still naturally that color.
“How’s our boy, Pat?” asked Walker, coming around her desk so that he could see her monitors.
Heldner pressed enter to send her message and then sat up in her rolling chair, straightening her white lab coat. “We’re still touch and go. Quinn is on the C-17, headed for Landstuhl, and unless the flight surgeon does something stupid, he’s going to live. Whether or not he’ll ever see field ops again remains to be seen. He won’t be shooting so much as a cap gun for months, I can tell you that.” She glowered up at Walker. “When Nick checks in, I want to talk to him.”
“You want to yell at him. There’s a difference.”
“He’s the team lead. It’s his job to protect them.”
“And he does, as best he can. You know that. You’ve seen how far he’ll go to protect his own.”
“From the dangers that he puts in their path. Just like you, I suppose.” The doctor wasn’t really looking for a fight, but she wasn’t averse to one either, not while one of her boys lay bloodied and unconscious on a gurney, thirty thousand feet over the Balkans. “Don’t think that I don’t see the pride in your eyes every time Nick takes his team into the field. You think he’s a younger version of you.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re being unkind.”
“To Baron or to myself?”
“Let me talk to him, Dick,” Heldner pushed. “I need him to tell me what Quinn had for breakfast before he was shot.”
Walker smiled. “No, you don’t.” He started for the door. “I don’t need you giving Baron a guilt trip right now. I need his mind free so he can figure out our latest puzzle.”
“What’s that?”
“Baron got a lead on a weaponsmith named Ayan Ashaq who may have worked with the shooter.”
“So?”
“So the intel that Molly dug up on this character doesn’t make any sense.”
CHAPTER 23
Ankara, Turkey
Ayan Ashaq was dead. Amid all his mysterious gloom and doom, Hadad had failed to mention that little tidbit. Although the revelation was nothing earth-shattering, not when taken with the rest of the data Molly had mined out of the Turkish system.
Living to the ripe old age of ninety-seven, Ay
an Ashaq had led a quiet, assassination-free life, never traveling far from Ankara. He had died just as quietly not two years before, and he had no male heirs, though his sixty-four-year-old niece, Safa, had retained ownership of the family’s ancestral shop in the Ankara Citadel. City records currently listed the shop as closed.
Only one item in all of Molly’s results hinted at anything out of place—a close-up photograph of Ashaq dated 1952. The man in the picture, the man who died a senior citizen almost two years ago and bore no male heirs, looked identical to the man Nick had fought on the tower rooftop.
Under a moonless sky, Nick and Drake raced along the high, red stone wall of Ankara’s Byzantine Citadel. They wore MultiCam fatigues and steadied equipment satchels and suppressed MP7s slung at their sides as they ran. On their left, a jagged, near vertical slope fell away from the thirty-foot ramparts to the rocks below. On their right, inside the wall, stood a hilltop settlement that traced its origins back to the early Hittites, four thousand years ago. Narrow cobblestone streets wound between two- and three-story houses constructed of dark timber and whitewashed mud brick. The oldest structures were built into the wall itself, constructed of the same ancient red stones. Ashaq’s place was one of these.
“Hurry up, you two,” said Scott, his voice tinged with annoyance. The engineer waited in a Renault Clio near the bottom of the hill, monitoring their progress on his laptop. “And someone tell me why I’m sitting in a parking lot and not sitting comfortably at my desk in the hotel room.”
“You’re here in case we need the car on short notice,” said Nick. He kept his voice at a whisper, easily heard by the other two in their SATCOM earpieces.
“With Nightmare Three out of commission, you have to fill two jobs,” added Drake. “You get to be wheel man and tech geek. No offense.”
Scott sighed into the comm link. “I hate you.”
The shop’s tile roof was twenty feet below the top of the wall. Nick looped a camouflage rope around one of several thick spikes meant to keep birds from roosting on the ramparts and secured it with a heavy polymer clip. He gave it a tug to make sure it would hold and then slid down, managing his speed with the grip through the leather pads on his Nomex gloves.
Drake followed him down, and the two of them crept to the front of the roof where Nick installed an early-warning device on a timber that jutted out from the peak. The booger cam—Drake’s name for it—was a micro-camera set in a marble of green sticky material. The gum adhered to almost any surface and would hold any angle.
“So what do an undead sniper and a mythical society of assassins have to do with our DC bomber?” asked Drake, watching the street while Nick worked.
Nick waved a hand in front of the camera and checked the corresponding feed on his smartphone. “Ashaq is not undead. This group must keep their male children hidden, raise them outside the system. It’s the only explanation.”
Drake raised an eyebrow. “Says you. Either way, how does he relate to the suicide bomber?”
“I don’t know.” Nick pushed back from the edge. “Let’s find out.”
The structure next door shared a wall with Ashaq’s shop, but its roof was four feet lower. Scott’s satellite imagery had caught the glint of a window there. Nick and Drake carefully lowered themselves down to the next roof and found a single pane in a two-foot-by-three-foot frame. “It’s big enough,” said Nick. “This is where we go in.”
While Drake affixed a suction cup to the mottled glass, Nick pressed what looked like a small cordless drill into the crux of the frame and dragged it along the window’s edge. The device generated a high-power laser, outside the visible spectrum; Nick had no indication it was working except for the red LED on the handle and the whisper of micro-fractures forming in the glass.
After Nick completed the circuit, Drake held the suction cup fast and gave the window a light bump with his fist. The whole piece came free. He handed it to Nick with a grin. “Don’t drop this.”
One after the other, they slipped into the top floor of the structure and activated the red tac lights on their MP7s, illuminating a smithy from another age. An old wooden table beneath the window was cluttered with iron tools and sticks of soft metal. Next to it was a pedal-powered grinder, and in the back corner, a blackened brickwork stove with a chimney running up through the roof.
“I know what I want for Christmas now,” said Drake. He had moved to the front of the room, and stood over a long bench where several ornate knives lay on a black velvet cloth, their silver and gold inlays shimmering red under his light.
“Don’t touch,” said Nick. “We’re not here to shop.”
“Yeah, but maybe they have a Web store.”
Nick wasn’t exactly sure what they were looking for—records, a recent photo, anything that might help them find the shooter. After the events of the morning, he had a deep desire to spend some quality time with the guy. The two of them panned their lights across every inch of the stone walls and floor, but there were no pictures, no safe, not even a file cabinet.
“I guess we go down,” said Drake, nodding toward a narrow flight of stairs.
They doused their lights and moved cautiously down the steps—Nick first, Drake above him, his weapon leveled over his teammate’s shoulder. Nick saw no movement in the dark and flipped his light on again to get a better look. A wide, old-fashioned desk against the opposite wall looked promising. So did a tall gun rack at the back of the room, though its dozen rifle slots were all empty.
“This is more like it,” whispered Drake, joining him at the bottom of the steps, but his optimism turned out to be premature.
While Drake examined a set of black-powder-coated shelves next to the gun rack, Nick searched the desk. Every drawer was empty. A corkboard mounted above it had only a few torn scraps pinned beneath its thumbtacks, as if someone had hurriedly stripped it bare.
“Nothing over here,” said Drake. “The dust pattern tells me these shelves were full recently, but they’re empty now. Same with the gun rack.”
“We’re too late,” grumbled Nick. “Whoever was using this shop has bugged out.” He shoved the last drawer into place, jolting the desk. There was a light flap of paper falling to the floor.
“Find something?” asked Drake.
“Maybe.” Nick bent down and searched the floor, rising a few seconds later with an eight-by-ten photo with one corner torn off, probably a former tenant of the corkboard that got trapped behind the desk when the room was hastily cleared. It depicted an Indian man with thinning gray hair exiting a building. The lettering on the glass doors behind him read IBE LABS.
Nick switched his tac light to white and took a snapshot with his phone. Then he texted the picture to CJ, with the message WHO AND WHERE?
As he pressed send, an alarm sounded in his earpiece. Video from the booger cam replaced the text window on his screen. A figure approached the shop door. Nick couldn’t tell if it was their shooter, but it certainly wasn’t the elderly woman who was supposed to own the shop. He signaled Drake and they took up positions on either side of the door.
“What’s happening?” asked Scott, sensing the urgent silence on the comm link.
Before Nick could tell the engineer to shut up, the door swung open. Incandescent bulbs flashed on overhead, filling the room with yellow light. Nick leveled his MP7 at the man’s head. “Close the door. Slowly.”
The intruder obeyed. He was the same man Nick had faced on the roof of the university tower, the man who bore such an uncanny resemblance to the old picture of Ayan Ashaq. This time the killer wore black slacks and a green button-down, looking much less like the grim reaper than before. He stepped away from the door. “Don’t move,” ordered Drake from behind him. “Show us your hands.”
The sniper understood English, or at least he understood the order from the tone of Drake’s voice. He slowly raised both hands. His left was empty. His ri
ght, still balled around his keys.
“Who are you?” demanded Nick. “Who do you work for?”
The shooter remained silent and took another step into the room, moving closer to the desk. Nick couldn’t read his intentions. That desk was empty, unless there was a hidden weapon he hadn’t found. He sure wasn’t going to let the shooter get any closer so he could find out. “Do it,” he said to Drake.
Drake had the shooter covered with a stun gun instead of his MP7. He fired it into the man’s back from short range and the sniper’s face contracted for an instant. Then it relaxed. He took another step toward the desk. Drake pulled the trigger again, pumping another charge into the man’s back, but it had no effect at all. The shooter gave Nick a defiant grin and opened his right hand, dropping its contents. Nick could plainly see the black Hashashin symbol on the sniper’s palm. He could also see a tin ring with a short pin hanging from the sniper’s middle finger. Those were no ordinary keys.
“Grenade!” Nick shouted, backing away and diving to the floor.
A flash filled the room, along with a deafening boom, followed by a cloud of foul smoke.
Stupid. A flash bang. Nick heard Drake coughing in the haze. “You okay?”
“I’m good,” said Drake through his cough. “I had the door. He didn’t go that way. Didn’t take the stairs either. You got a tally?”
“Negative.”
As the smoke started to clear, Drake materialized near the stairs, but Nick saw no sign of the shooter. He kicked the old desk. “There’s no way! Not again!” Then he noticed the Persian rug at his feet. It was actually two pieces, fit together at the middle to form one continuous pattern. He hadn’t seen it before, but now the seam was disturbed, one piece slightly above the other. He crouched down and threw both sides back, revealing a wooden hatch in the stone floor underneath. “Here! Come on!”