As the door swung open, Nick and Drake rushed in with their Tasers leveled, searching for targets. They saw no one. Scott opened his mouth to speak, but Nick shut him up with a sharp look. He pointed at Drake and with a wave of his hand, directed him toward the kitchen while he moved silently into a short hallway at the back.
The door on the left of the little hall was too narrow to be an entrance to a room. It had to be a closet. Nick checked the door to the right. The knob turned easily and he pressed into the room. Again, there was no one.
Drake appeared at his shoulder. “The kitchen and living area are clear.”
“Same,” said Nick, pocketing his Taser. “No one’s here.” He returned to the living area and shut and locked the apartment door.
“Do we even have the right apartment?”
“If I could have permission to speak now, I think I can answer that,” said Scott.
Nick nodded. “Speak.”
The engineer pointed over Nick’s shoulder to a short, unobtrusive rack that stood against the front wall of the apartment. There were four shelves, each holding a whirring silver box, ten inches wide, flat and unadorned except for a single green LED blinking on one end. A bundle of cables ran from the rack to another silver box that sat on a small desk. That box was connected to a laptop with a simple USB cable. “This is the place,” he said.
“That’s it?” asked Drake. “That’s our terrorist communications network.”
“It is. At least, it’s the heart of it.”
Drake strode over to the rack. “Then let’s pull the plug and get out of here.” He bent down to pull the servers away from the wall. “You can hack into the servers at the hotel while we search for Grendel.”
“Wait!” said Scott, rushing toward him with an outstretched hand.
Drake abruptly stepped back, surprised by the command carried in the engineer’s voice. “What?”
“The servers will be booby-trapped.”
“You mean a bomb?”
Scott frowned at him. “No, you Neanderthal, I mean a delete program. It’s common practice in the hacker underground. Almost any computer can be hacked if you can get it to the right people, so you have to rig your servers to wipe clean if they’re moved.”
Nick eyed the laptop. “Can you hack the system here?”
“Yes, but it’s likely that Grendel included additional security measures. If I work too quickly, I could miss a digital trip wire that has the same effect.”
“Then get to work. The clock’s ticking.”
Scott picked up his black bag and tentatively approached the desk. A foot away from the chair, he froze.
“What is it?” asked Drake. “Is the desk booby-trapped too?”
“No. It’s filthy. How can any hacker work in an environment like this?” Scott pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dusted the laptop keys and the chair cushion. When he finished, he considered the handkerchief for a moment and then flung it at the wastebasket next to the desk. It flopped across the top, knocking a crumpled paper onto the floor where several others were already gathered.
Nick picked up the paper and unraveled it. The fading print listed the address of a nightclub and a hefty bar tab. He set it on the desk and picked up several more. All of them were receipts from the same club, all paid in cash. “We have a hangout,” he said.
“And we have a picture,” said Drake. He nodded at the laptop that Scott had brought to life. The screen saver showed a young man in his early twenties, reclining on a leather bench with three women in micro-miniskirts. His hand was raised to the camera in some gesture that Nick did not recognize and his tongue was hanging out. The women looked bored.
“It looks like our hacker has a taste for the nightlife,” said Nick. “I’ll take Quinn and stake out the bar.” He turned to Drake. “Watch the door. Grendel might come here at any time. If he does, bag him and call me on SATCOM. Whatever happens, be out of here in five hours.”
CHAPTER 13
A well-executed snatch-and-grab required weeks of planning. A CAT, a covert abduction team, might burn a hundred or more man-hours documenting a subject’s routine — learning his habits and clearing away the chaff of random daily occurrence to isolate predictable behaviors. Nick didn’t have a team. He had Quinn, and he had the time span of a drive across Budapest to plan the abduction, using nothing but a smartphone and a bar receipt.
In ad hoc situations like this one, common sense dictated that the team at least take the subject at a point with no potential witnesses and with easy access for the abduction vehicle. The satellite imagery on Nick’s smartphone showed that the Black Dog — Grendel’s favorite nightclub — offered neither.
“Maybe we could wait for Grendel to come out and then follow him,” said Quinn, eyeing the steroid-pumped bouncer outside the bar as he and Nick approached on foot. The Black Dog was a basement bar, with its primary entrance in a stairwell on an otherwise dark and narrow cobblestone street. In addition to the bouncer, there were three large men hanging out at the edge of the alley, chatting up a couple of bleach blondes in tight jeans.
“We can’t afford the time,” replied Nick. “We don’t even know if he’s in there. You want to stand out here all night?”
“What if the bouncer pats us down?”
“He won’t.”
As Nick led his young teammate into the alley, the girls broke from their conversation to cast flirtatious taunts in their direction, alternating between stunted English and only slightly better German. A muted, pulsating beat emanated from the stairwell — club music stripped of everything but the bass by the heavy black door.
The bouncer pushed off from his post against the brick wall and barred their path, his hands gripping the lapels of his black leather jacket. His eyes shifted from Nick’s blue irises up to his blond hair and back. “This is Hungarian bar. We don’t take dollars or euros here.”
“Kak naschet rubley?” asked Nick in cool Russian, roughly pressing a thousand-ruble bill against the brute’s chest.
The bouncer smiled. He took the bill, the Russian equivalent of a U.S. fifty, and stepped aside. “Naslazhdaytes’, ser.”
A blast of heat greeted Nick as he opened the door, and a cacophony of digital tones joined the thumping bass. Dim red light glowed through a haze of cigarette smoke. He and Quinn cut through the sparse crowd of dancers, making for one of the shiny black couches that lined the walls. A few of the patrons looked their way, but no one challenged them. They had already passed the gatekeeper at the top of the stairs. That was enough.
“How did you know to bring rubles?” asked Quinn once they had settled onto a secluded stretch of overstuffed vinyl.
“In this country, rubles almost always grease palms better than dollars,” said Nick, slipping his hand into the inside pocket of his coat, but he immediately removed it again as a fair-skinned girl with raven hair approached the table. She was young, far too young to be dressed as she was, in a thigh-length minidress that might have been cut from the same cheap vinyl as the couch.
The girl bent down with a tray of drinks and said something in a sultry voice that did not fit her young features. Her eyes flitted over to Quinn.
Nick didn’t pick up all the Hungarian, but he could gather the gist of what she said. The thought made him ill. He selected a pair of dark beers from the tray and replaced them with a wad of rubles, letting his hard expression tell the girl that he and his young friend were there for drinks and nothing more. She didn’t press him, almost looked grateful. She straightened and turned back toward the bar, wobbling on her stiletto heels as she did.