Author: James R. Hannibal
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/james-r-hannibal/page,16,59578-shadow_maker.html
CHAPTER 36
The building in the video, the building where Kattan disappeared, was twelve stories of glass and concrete owned by the financial conglomerate Fishman Zeller—two towers of offices, separated by a narrow glass atrium, standing at the western end of Paternoster Square. Fishman Zeller occupied all of the southern tower, but the company rented out the offices of the northern tower to smaller investment companies. Molly had done a little digging and discovered that one of those companies had a paper-thin corporate veil.
According to the Fishman Zeller records, Kingdom Ventures Incorporated was a ten-year-old Dubai investment company that opened its London offices less than a month before, leasing the entire sublevel of the northern tower—two thousand square feet of office space. Molly cross-checked KVI’s tax filings with the City of London and uncovered two classic signs of a front company with a fictional corporate history—minimal transaction volume and earnings that matched to a percentage point year over year. No investment company was that consistent.
Scott had done some digging as well. “I own their cameras, their elevators, whatever you want,” he told Nick over the comm link. “The firewalls to the tower security system were tragically easy to hack.”
Nick nodded as if Scott could see him, his phone still at his ear to mask the SATCOM conversation. From the partial concealment of a Renaissance arch on the southwest corner of the square, he surveiled the entrance between the Fishman Zeller towers. Foot traffic was light, only a few people going in or out. None of them looked like Kattan or Maharani. “Any escape routes besides the obvious?”
“Do you see the big column?”
A gaudy Corinthian column rose out of the northwest section of the square between the towers and the London Stock Exchange. With the gold-plated flaming urn at its top, it reached a height of seventy-five feet or more, and with a base at least twenty-five feet in diameter and twenty feet tall, it blocked Nick’s view of the western quarter of the exchange. “How could I miss it? Another monument to the empire.”
“Except it isn’t a monument at all,” said Scott. “You’re looking at the world’s most overdressed exhaust vent. The London Stock Exchange has a basement level that extends out beneath the square, housing a massive server room—literally thousands of networked drives. It takes some heavy-duty air-conditioning to keep all those electronics cool, and that column is really a giant stack that vents the exhaust.”
“And I care about the vent because . . .”
“Not so much the vent as the server room underneath it. There’s a thirty-meter utility tunnel connecting it to Fishman Zeller. The access panel is in the front hallway of KVI.”
“Kattan might run that way.”
“He might try. The good news is, the tunnel is a dead end. The exchange side is secured by a steel door, four inches thick. If Kattan tries to sneak out through the crawl space, he’ll be trapped.”
“Copy that.” Nick stared at the entrance for a few seconds. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that this was coming together too easily. “Be ready to shut down the elevators and the elevator alarms on my call. And when you have that set up, go back and look at all the footage we have of Kattan. Find me something we haven’t noticed before.”
“I’ve already been over that footage several times.”
“And I’m telling you to go over it again, every frame.” Nick’s eyes tracked another businessman leaving the Fishman Zeller towers. Like all the others he’d seen so far, this one was young, Caucasian, and not Kattan. From what he could tell, the target had not left the building, but Kattan wouldn’t stay in there forever, waiting to be caught. They needed to move. “Nightmare Two, give me an ETA.”
“Thirty seconds ago.” The voice was right behind him, not on the comm link. Drake walked beneath the arch from the cathedral side and joined Nick in the shadows against its eastern wall. “Where’s the lawyer?”
Now that he had someone visible to talk to, Nick returned his phone to his pocket, but he kept his eyes on the tower entrance. “By that, you mean where’s the hot chick?”
“You know me so well.”
“I put her on a train to get her out of the way and keep her away from you. One day you and Amanda will both thank me.”
“She went willingly?”
“Not really.” Nick slipped the strap of one of his satchels over his head and handed it to Drake. “I brought you something.”
“A European carryall? You shouldn’t have.”
“With an old friend inside.”
Drake hefted the satchel, feeling the weight of the MP7. He grinned. “A good friend.” Then he reached into his pocket. “I brought something for you, too, a gift from your old professor.” He handed Nick a small green statuette, jade by the look and feel of it. The figure was a complex geometric shape—two faceted cones that blended together and then tapered down to a narrow base. “Look familiar?”
When Nick shook his head, Drake took the figure and laid it flat in his teammate’s hand. “How about now?”
Suddenly Nick made the connection. Viewed in two dimensions, the figure matched one of the Hashashin symbols, the sawtooth with the narrow base.
“What is this thing?”
“A Persian chess piece.”
Drake related the final bit of history that Rami had shared with him. The early Muslim leaders had outlawed traditional chess sets, fearing the lifelike figurines would be worshipped as pagan idols. Cunning adherents to the game revived it by simplifying the pieces. The elephant—the precursor to the bishop—became a double crescent moon, representing the tusks. The two spires of the piece in Nick’s hand represented the two heads of chariot horses. Later, the Europeans would interpret them as castle battlements—the rook. Each of the Insari Hashashin symbols represented a chess piece. General Insar had been obsessed with the game.
Drake pulled out his phone and flipped through the symbols, explaining each one. “The overlapping triangles are the knight,” he said, “and the horizontal crescent moon is the queen.” He flipped to the last picture, the crescent moon over the eight-pointed star. “This is Kattan’s symbol. Guess which piece it represents.”
“The king,” said Nick, pushing away from the arch and starting across the square. “I guess it’s time to take him down and end the game.”
The two operatives were halfway to the tower entrance when Scott spoke up over the SATCOM. “It’s the boxes!” he exclaimed. His voice was both excited and nervous.
“We’re a little busy here,” said Nick, reaching a hand into his satchel to find the grip of his MP7. “Get ready to shut down the elevators. We’ll take the stairs down to KVI and hem them in.”
The engineer ignored the command. “You don’t understand. You were right. We missed something in the footage. The boxes, they’re empty.”
Nick released his weapon and touched Drake’s arm to slow their pace. “You’re not making any sense, Four.”
Scott gave a frustrated huff. “When Kattan and Maharani left IBE, pieces of lab equipment were sticking out of their boxes. The tops were only half-closed. When they carried them into Fishman Zeller, the tops were flat. I’m telling you, the boxes were empty.”
Nick came to a complete stop and looked up at his teammate. “Why would they pretend to bring the lab equipment to KVI?”
Before Drake could respond they heard a muted boom like far off thunder. The ground beneath their feet rumbled.
“The seismic alarms in the towers just tripped,” said Scott. “The elevators are locking down on their own.”
Another explosion sounded, and then another and another in rhythmic cadence. The Fishman Zeller towers visibly shook. The pedestrians in the square stumbled back and stared as glass fell from the atrium windows.
“Come on!” shouted Nick, and the two operatives ran toward the buildings.
CHAPTER 37
Nick
and Drake pushed their way through the flood of suits pouring from the lobby. Periodic explosions still sounded from the sublevel—one every couple of seconds like artificial aftershocks. Smoke and dust billowed up through vents in the floor, and glass rained down from the bridges that crisscrossed the atrium above.
Nick spied an elderly man lying on the gray marble floor, bleeding from a deep gash in his thigh. He sent Drake to help and kept searching for wounded. Deeper in, a young woman in a white blouse and black business skirt stood frozen in fear, her knees pressed together and her hands spread out, trying to maintain her balance on the quaking floor. For a split second, she locked eyes with Nick. Then a final blast, an explosion that dwarfed all the rest, ripped through the floor, heaving granite tiles upward on a wave of concrete that launched the woman into the air. She came crashing down on Nick’s side of the fissure and screamed in pain. As the echo of the blast settled, there was a rending and cracking of stone. The gap behind the girl began to widen.
Nick ran toward her and dove flat out onto the broken floor, catching her hand before the cave-in swallowed her whole. Wasting no time, he pulled her up and hoisted her over his shoulder and then sprinted for the exit with the floor collapsing at his heels.
As he emerged from the thick cloud of dust into the haze on the plaza, Nick heard a strange command.
“Set her down, mate. Nice and easy.”
He slowed to a jog and then a walk, still a little disoriented. A dark-haired individual materialized to his right, tracking him with the short barrel of a Glock compact. He wore a suit and overcoat much like Nick’s and held up a badge with an eight-pointed star and a crown. The badge made him Metro Police. The Glock made him Special Branch, a superbobby. Regular bobbies carried Tasers.
Nick kept walking. The woman had lost her shoes in the explosion, and he did not want to set her down on the broken glass that littered the square in front of the building.
“I said set her down, mate.”
Convinced by the constable’s behavior that Nick meant her harm, the woman started to thrash, kicking her feet and pounding his back with her fists. Nick bore the abuse and the threat from the Glock until he reached clear ground next to the gaudy fake monument. As soon as he set her down, she turned and limped away into the growing crowd.
“You’re welcome,” Nick said flatly. Then he turned to survey what was left of the building. The dust cloud still hovered, obscuring the first floor. Every window on the second floor had shattered, along with several more on the floors above. A few more accountants and stockbrokers stumbled out over the piles of glass, beating the dust from their expensive suits and squinting at the sunlight.
“Oi! Mate! Hands where I can see ’em.”
Oh, right. The superbobby. Nick turned to face his accuser, not certain how rescuing a woman from a disaster area warranted the threat of deadly force. Then he became aware that Drake was right next to him.
“What’s his problem?” he muttered to his teammate, raising his hands.
“Your answer is at nine o’clock,” Drake replied, raising his own hands, “coming in hot.”
Nick looked left in time to get slapped in the face by Chaya Maharani. Tears streamed down the lawyer’s cheeks. “What have you done?”
“Oi! Doesn’t anyone care about the man with the gun?” asked the constable, clipping his badge to his belt.
Nick and Drake glanced at each other and then back at the Brit. “No,” they replied in unison.
“I told you,” said Chaya, turning her anger on the policeman. “They’re Interpol. They’re chasing the terrorists who kidnapped my father.”
A pair of uniformed bobbies in yellow reflective jackets closed in with their batons drawn and motioned Chaya back. They patted the two Americans down and removed the Beretta Nanos from the holsters under each man’s shoulder. One of them found Nick’s ID wallet and tossed it to the plainclothesman.
The superbobby flipped it open and frowned at the badge. “Right. Interpol. The thing is, if Interpol was chasing terrorists in London, they would have coordinated with Counter Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard. And if they had coordinated with CTC, then I would know all about it.”
“You’re SO15,” said Nick.
“That’s right. And if you’re Interpol, then Bob here is the Prince of Wales.”
Drake gave a little curtsy to the uniformed constable next to him. “Your Majesty.”
Nick’s phone chimed. He looked his captor in the eye. “I’m going to get that.”
The plainclothesman raised his gun in protest, but Nick retrieved his phone anyway. On the screen, he saw another message in the ivory letters of his chess app. TheEmissary has put you in check.
Even as he lowered the phone, the general murmur of the crowd on the square shifted. Heads turned from the shattered towers to the London Stock Exchange next door. Nick glanced over his shoulder and through the tall windows he could see all the numbers on the giant ticker display turning red. Every stock plummeted. One of the verses CJ had sent him jumped to the front of his mind. And the marketplace will erupt in turmoil. “Something bad is about to happen.”
“Something bad indeed,” said the plainclothesman, tucking his Glock into its holster and closing the distance to the Americans. “You two are under arrest.”
One of the bobbies reached for Nick’s wrist. He jerked it away.
“Easy, mate.” The bobby reached for him again, slower this time.
Nick’s eyes remained fixed on the ticker. The stocks kept falling. Cell phones were ringing all over the square. People were shouting inside the exchange. Suddenly all the numbers disappeared. Red dots flew in from all sides of the ticker and formed a slowly flashing message: NOW BEAR WITNESS TO THE SECOND SIGN.
Then the message stopped flashing and faded, replaced by a countdown from ten. Several people in the crowd counted with it. “Nine!”
“Fishman Zeller wasn’t the target,” said Nick as the bobby drew his hands together in front of him and locked them in steel cuffs. “It was the London Stock Exchange. And if they have control of the tickers, they must control . . .” His voice faded and his eyes drifted up to the top of the fake Corinthian column. A wisp of smoke rose skyward from the gilded rim. “The server room.”
“Six!” Most of the crowd was now treating the countdown like an early New Year’s. The explosions were all but forgotten. Pockets of laughter erupted all over the square.
Idiots.
“Get back!” shouted Nick. He slammed his shoulder into the plainclothesman’s chest, lifting the Glock from its holster with his cuffed hands and firing it into the air. Then he leveled the weapon and turned in a circle. “Get away from the column! Get back! Get back!”
The tactic worked. Those nearest to the column stopped counting and backed away. One of the bobbies pulled Chaya into the crowd, trying to protect her from the crazed American.
As he heard the crowd count, “Three!” Nick dropped the gun and rushed the constable, Drake at his side. The two of them lifted the SO15 man by the armpits and dragged him toward the middle of the square.
“Two!”
“One!”
A wild cheer went up, and a fraction of a second later it was silenced by the biggest explosion yet.
Nick and Drake fell to the ground on top of the constable as a cloud of dust and smoke rolled over them. Twisting onto his side, Nick could see the seventy-five-foot column settle back down into the square and tip over. The concrete mask fell away and the huge rusted standpipe beneath it let out an angry groan and slammed into the face of the Exchange.
Nick struggled to his feet and started toward the wreckage, but a heavy hand grabbed him by the shoulder and swung him around. “Where do you think you’re going?” asked the man from SO15.
“Uncuff me! People are in there. I can help.”
The constable took Nick by the front of h
is shirt with one hand and flicked open a telescoping baton with the other, hauling it back. “I don’t think so, mate.”
CHAPTER 38
Nick woke up facedown on a polished concrete floor, staring at the distorted reflection of four cinderblock walls and a cold fluorescent light. His vision was fuzzy and he had a splitting headache, made worse by Scott’s voice in his ear, repeatedly insisting that he respond.
“I’m awake,” he mumbled, just to get the engineer to shut up. His coat, shirt, and bulletproof vest were gone, leaving him nothing above the belt but his black Lycra undershirt. His hands, originally bound in front with steel cuffs, had been released and re-secured at his back with flex-cuffs, cinched so tight his fingers were numb. He supposed stealing the constable’s gun and threatening civilians with it had something to do with that.
The position of Nick’s hands and shoulders made getting up an awkward process. He pulled his knees to his chest and then rolled up onto them. From there, he took his time standing up. Waves of nausea threatened to knock him back down. He found it hard to focus his mind.
“Where am I?”
“Scotland Yard,” the engineer replied, his voice tight, his words quick. “The headquarters building on Victoria Street. I’m glad you’re awake. What’s the plan?”
The cell was small, maybe six by ten. Nick saw a camera staring down from the corner above the door, but he didn’t see an audio receiver of any kind. Someone was watching, but they weren’t listening. He staggered over to the opposite corner and leaned his shoulder against the wall, turning his face away from the camera. “Is Nightmare Two up on comms?”
Drake chimed in, as chipper as always. “I’ve had the rubber ducky song stuck in my head since the column fell. Do you think that’s a side effect of a concussion?”
Scott sighed. “Yes. He’s up.”
“I’m serious. Why am I remembering songs from Sesame Street? I don’t even have kids.”
“How long, Nightmare Four?” asked Nick, ignoring Drake’s antics.