Nick watched her go for a moment. He knew what she was, and he could easily reconstruct how she got there. He wanted to drag her back to the airport and put her on the team’s Gulfstream, send her home to DC where she could be a barista instead of a barmaid, but his team wasn’t here for her.
Quinn also watched the girl walk away, likely with different thoughts. “Snap out of it, junior,” said Nick. “Let’s find our boy and bag him.”
He reached into his coat again and withdrew his phone, a slim unit a little larger than an iPhone. The device consolidated both his civilian and company needs into one unit, with a firewall that separated the more interesting functions from the mundane. Walker had placed only two restrictions on apps for the personal side. No Facebook. No Twitter. No big loss.
Nick had Angry Birds, though. Everyone had Angry Birds.
The program he used now came from Scott rather than the App Store and resided on the classified side of the firewall. The engineer had pulled the screen saver from Grendel’s laptop, trimmed it to just the face, and transferred it to Nick’s phone. The app identified the subject’s key features: skin tone, hairline, bone structure. Then an algorithm built a three-dimensional predictive model.
Nick held the phone flat between them so that Quinn could see, showing him the screen as if showing pictures to his friend, working it with his thumb. He wore a ring on his left hand — titanium, bulky. There were three square black stones across the top. The middle square housed the lens of a micro-camera that fed video to the phone. He scanned the room with subtle movements of his hand, combining them with the natural movements of his body.
Nick paused on each group of patrons while the software went to work. It placed a red X over the faces it rejected, working quickly on the girls, taking more time with the men, but not much. Most of them were too big, with flat foreheads and square jaws. Their faces screamed Bratva, Russian mafia, and their eyes were glancing his way. Nick looked up for a moment and noticed his young teammate staring stone-faced at the phone.
“Pick up your drink and smile a little,” he said through his teeth. “Or you’re going to get us killed.”
“I quit drinking a while ago. You know that.”
The kid had been a passenger in a drunk-driving accident during his special ops training. He was too blasted to save the life of the driver, his best friend, despite being a qualified medic. He hadn’t tasted a drop since.
“That doesn’t mean you can’t hold a beer in your hands.” Nick didn’t drink either, but for completely different reasons. He let out a laugh, big enough to be seen by anyone watching and subtle enough to appear legitimate. “Quit acting like you’re at work. This is a nightclub, not Kandahar.”
Quinn picked up his beer and responded with a fake laugh of his own. “At least in Kandahar there was no pretending. Everyone was as miserable as we were. Where is this guy?”
Nick continued to pan the camera around the room. Brick pillars rose from the floor at wide intervals, topped with arched buttresses that supported the building above. Each had a circular cushion of cheap vinyl surrounding its base, and most of those were occupied by two or three patrons. Nick’s program rejected them all, until the camera finally fell on a young man sitting alone in a recess in the far wall. A pair of spent beer bottles and a full tumbler of liquor sat on the black lacquer table in front of him. The software chewed on him for a while, with tiny white circles dancing over his features, but it couldn’t make up its mind. Then the subject leaned out into the red light to signal a waitress. Instantly, a green box surrounded his face. A number below it proclaimed him a ninety-two-percent match for Grendel.
“Time to go,” said Nick.
There were no direct exits on Grendel’s side of the club, but the waitresses occasionally moved in and out of a swinging door behind the bar. As Nick and Quinn crossed the floor, Nick wrapped an arm tightly around the kid’s shoulders and shook him, leaning close to his ear as if sharing a drunken joke. “If Grendel bolts, stay between him and the entrance. I’ve got the door behind the bar.” Then he pushed Quinn away again and reached into his pocket to palm a fresh CO2 injector.
The skinny hacker didn’t notice the two foreigners approaching. He was preoccupied with getting a passing waitress to keep him company, the same one who had brought Nick and Quinn their drinks. He called after her using the haranguing tone universal to twentysomething males with a little too much alcohol and way too much confidence.
The girl rattled off a curt response and punctuated it by spitting on the floor.
Grendel would have none of it. He shouted at her and slammed his fist on the lacquer table, knocking over one of the beer bottles. His rant caught the attention of the indoor bouncer, the same size as the man outside. The big Hungarian came out from behind the bar.
“Back off,” said Nick, touching Quinn’s arm. “This window is closing.”
As they turned toward the bar, a drunk stumbled past, bumping hard into Quinn and loudly excusing himself. The stench of old booze assaulted Nick’s nostrils. Grendel looked up from his confrontation and stared. His eyes locked on Quinn’s midsection. The jostling from the drunk had knocked the kid’s jacket open. The butt of his forty-five was exposed. They were blown.
CHAPTER 14
Grendel upended his table with both hands, launching the bottles and the full tumbler at the bouncer, who reeled back into Nick and Quinn. As Nick caught the big Hungarian, the hacker scrambled over the bar and vanished through the swinging door.
“Get to the street,” grunted Nick, shoving the bouncer back to his feet. Quinn obediently headed for the entrance while Nick took off in pursuit, leaving the bouncer standing alone in utter confusion. He reached the bar in two strides and vaulted over. His low foot caught a whiskey bottle and sent it flying into the mirrored backdrop. Glass and booze showered down.
Nick shouldered his way through the swinging door into a red-carpeted hallway, bound on one side by a brick wall and on the other by a row of rooms. A stunned waitress came out of one and then screamed and retreated back inside, slamming the door. The rest were closed, but the door at the far end of the hallway stood open. Immediately behind it there was another that opened the opposite direction. That one hung loose on its hinges. The dead bolt had been knocked through, splintering the old wood frame.
The buildings here were pressed against each other, with varying heights but with shared walls. Pairs of doors like these connected their cellars. Nick touched his ear. “Nightmare Three, he’s headed southeast through the sublevels. He’ll have to surface when he reaches the end of the row. Get in front of him.”
“Copy, One. I’m on it.”
As soon as Nick opened the second door, a heavy shelving unit came crashing down from his right. He jumped back. A shadow flitted away across a dark storeroom.
“We just want to talk,” Nick called after him, clambering over the half-fallen unit, but Grendel kept running, toppling more shelves before escaping through a heavy door. Dim blue light spilled in from the other side.
“He’s coming to you, Nightmare Three. I think he’s in an outside stairwell.”
Nick made quick work of Grendel’s obstacle course and hit the door’s push bar hard. He expected to slam into the wall of a stairwell on the other side. Instead, he almost plunged headfirst off a narrow concrete platform.
“I don’t see him,” said Quinn.
“Scratch my last. We’re in the subway. I’m turning southwest.” A few dim fluorescents lighted the narrow platform. There were no travelers. Nick spotted the hacker at the far end and drew his Beretta. “Stay where you are!”