Nick threw a left-and-right combination, connecting with the left before the shooter reared up, out of range. As if by magic, a knife appeared in his hand, an ornate curved hilt with two black blades on either end, forming a crescent. He grinned and slashed down at Nick’s throat.
Nick caught the wide sleeve of the cloak and redirected the shooter’s momentum rather than blocking it, pulling his arm across his body. The first blade missed his neck by an inch. The tip of the second blade missed it by a millimeter. After the knife cleared his throat, he kept pulling in an arc, stretching his arm back above his head to pull the shooter forward and off balance. At the same time he bumped upward with his hips and twisted right. The lip of the roof acted as a stop, blocking his opponent’s knee. The shooter’s eyes widened and he toppled over the edge.
After taking a moment to catch his breath, Nick stood and peered over the side, expecting to see the sniper’s broken body lying on the pavement below and a crowd of students gathering around it. There was no one, no onlookers, no shooter, not even a scrap of cloak or a spot of blood.
Across the campus, the rescue chopper lifted off from the research center and nosed forward to rush Quinn to the hospital. Nick’s phone chimed, a message from his chess app. The ivory text read, The Emissary has taken your knight. Your move.
CHAPTER 19
A search of the roof revealed no weapon and no shell casings. The sniper had to have ditched his rifle before Nick made it up the stairs. Then a flash of gold caught his eye. The shooter’s strange knife lay on the lip of the roof.
Nick retrieved it and turned it over in his hand. Its workmanship was beautiful. Gold and silver arabesque inlays formed an intricate pattern of vines with heart-shaped leaves, weaving in and out of eight-pointed stars — all set into a dark alloy that he could not identify. The shooter must have dropped the knife when he went over the edge, though he managed to retract the blades. Nick could not figure out how to get them out again.
The woven designs on one side of the hilt surrounded a small silver inlay circle, enclosing two crescent moons set back-to-back, the same symbol tattooed on the sniper’s right palm. Lacing through the vines on the other side of the hilt was a phrase in flowing gold calligraphy. Nick understood the Arabic words, but he was not certain of their meaning.
“Nightmare One, did you get him?” asked Drake over the comm link.
“Negative. What about Three?”
“He looked bad when I put him on the chopper, no color at all. Lighthouse scrambled a C-17 out of Incirlik with a surgical team. The colonel doesn’t trust Turkish hospitals.”
The crowd filtered out from below the tower. Some of the young men stared up at the Western intruder. Nick could see blame in their eyes. “We need to get out of here. Get the gear from the car and see if Romeo Seven can arrange some transpo.”
“Back to the hotel?”
“Yeah. And then the market.” Nick glanced down at the ornate knife in his hand. “I need to talk to an old friend.”
Two hours later, Nick and Drake parked a new rental in a metered spot along the outer wall of Istanbul’s Old City. That morning they had been Interpol agents, now they were tourists. Nick wore jeans and a Columbia jacket. Drake wore khakis with a Walking Dead T-shirt under a windbreaker.
While they waited in the car for their appointment, Nick’s phone buzzed. He pressed it to his ear. “What’ve you got, CJ?”
“More than I want and not enough,” replied the FBI agent.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that while you’re running around, terrorizing Turkish college kids, I’m getting nowhere. I keep coming up with dead ends.”
“Don’t kid, CJ,” said Nick. “The Emissary sent out another move. You were watching the coffee shop. You should have bagged him by now.”
“It’s not that easy. If we roll in before pinpointing the exact customer, we’ll violate the civil rights of every legitimate caffeine addict in the joint. We can’t do that. Not in this girl’s America.”
“Have you made a list of regulars who were around when the moves were made?”
“Of course, but I need more data so I can rule more of them out. I need you to keep playing.”
“Roger that.” Nick heard voices and laughter. Drake was watching a YouTube video on his phone. He slapped the big operative’s arm with the back of his hand and gestured for him to keep an eye on the street. Drake frowned at him and rolled a finger in the air, signaling him to move the conversation along. Had he been born to another generation, Nick was certain his teammate would have been one of those ADD kids. He returned his attention to CJ. “I have something new for you to chew on.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Scott has been digging deeper into the scraps of code we found on Grendel’s servers. They are definitely part of a virus.”
“You have specifics?”
“Some.” He explained that the fragments resembled Stuxnet, the virus the NSA sent into Iran to wreak havoc on their nuclear centrifuges in 2010. Stuxnet was a very specific and very powerful program. It had no effect on the computers it passed through, but when it reached its target, it became the first virus to enter through Windows and cross-talk to an industrial control system. On the upside, Stuxnet spun the Iranian centrifuges out of control, doing as much damage as a gaggle of bunker busters. On the downside, it left copies of itself on millions of computers, becoming a blueprint for hackers worldwide.
“It was only a matter of time until one of these bozos found a way to adapt it,” said CJ. “What does Grendel’s version do?”
“We don’t know, but Scott is convinced that the virus and the messages to the suicide bomber are linked because they were kept on the same section of the server. I’ll have him send you a summary. For now, that’s all I’ve got.”
“You haven’t asked about the ‘more than I want.’”
Nick rolled his eyes. CJ could never just spit things out. She had to play games, a sign of the control freak inside. “Okay, I’ll bite. What did you mean by ‘more than I want’?”
“I’m so glad you asked. I’ve had more attention than I want from a certain Mr. Cartwright, the senator from Virginia — a lot more. It seems one of his staffers was injured in the bombing on the Mall, and a first responder refused to treat him. Ring any bells?”
“Not yet.”
“Tall guy. Lawyer. Claims that the first responder not only refused to treat his eye, he also punched him in the chest.”
Nick cringed. “Oh, yeah. That was me.”
There was a pause. In his mind’s eye, Nick could see CJ’s head cocking to one side, her free hand going to her hip. “Are you insane?”
“The guy had it coming. I had to get to people with more serious injuries, and he wouldn’t leave me alone. He got physical. I returned the favor.”
“I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Keep the senator at bay, CJ. We don’t need interference from power-hungry politicians.”
“What’s it worth to you?”
Nick closed his eyes. “Dinner?”
“He’s a U.S. senator.”
“Fine. A nice dinner. An expensive one. Whatever you want.”
“Tell you what, I’ll plead ignorance as long as I can, but if he keeps digging, he’s going to turn something up. He has the ear of the president. These days there’s no defense against that.”
Drake tapped Nick’s shoulder and pointed to his watch.