“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
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, Ayan 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.