Nick switched his tac light to white and took a snapshot with his phone. Then he texted the picture to CJ, with the message WHO AND WHERE?
As he pressed send, an alarm sounded in his earpiece. Video from the booger cam replaced the text window on his screen. A figure approached the shop door. Nick couldn’t tell if it was their shooter, but it certainly wasn’t the elderly woman who was supposed to own the shop. He signaled Drake and they took up positions on either side of the door.
“What’s happening?” asked Scott, sensing the urgent silence on the comm link.
Before Nick could tell the engineer to shut up, the door swung open. Incandescent bulbs flashed on overhead, filling the room with yellow light. Nick leveled his MP7 at the man’s head. “Close the door. Slowly.”
The intruder obeyed. He was the same man Nick had faced on the roof of the university tower, the man who bore such an uncanny resemblance to the old picture of Ayan Ashaq. This time the killer wore black slacks and a green button-down, looking much less like the grim reaper than before. He stepped away from the door. “Don’t move,” ordered Drake from behind him. “Show us your hands.”
The sniper understood English, or at least he understood the order from the tone of Drake’s voice. He slowly raised both hands. His left was empty. His right, still balled around his keys.
“Who are you?” demanded Nick. “Who do you work for?”
The shooter remained silent and took another step into the room, moving closer to the desk. Nick couldn’t read his intentions. That desk was empty, unless there was a hidden weapon he hadn’t found. He sure wasn’t going to let the shooter get any closer so he could find out. “Do it,” he said to Drake.
Drake had the shooter covered with a stun gun instead of his MP7. He fired it into the man’s back from short range and the sniper’s face contracted for an instant. Then it relaxed. He took another step toward the desk. Drake pulled the trigger again, pumping another charge into the man’s back, but it had no effect at all. The shooter gave Nick a defiant grin and opened his right hand, dropping its contents. Nick could plainly see the black Hashashin symbol on the sniper’s palm. He could also see a tin ring with a short pin hanging from the sniper’s middle finger. Those were no ordinary keys.
“Grenade!” Nick shouted, backing away and diving to the floor.
A flash filled the room, along with a deafening boom, followed by a cloud of foul smoke.
Stupid. A flash bang. Nick heard Drake coughing in the haze. “You okay?”
“I’m good,” said Drake through his cough. “I had the door. He didn’t go that way. Didn’t take the stairs either. You got a tally?”
“Negative.”
As the smoke started to clear, Drake materialized near the stairs, but Nick saw no sign of the shooter. He kicked the old desk. “There’s no way! Not again!” Then he noticed the Persian rug at his feet. It was actually two pieces, fit together at the middle to form one continuous pattern. He hadn’t seen it before, but now the seam was disturbed, one piece slightly above the other. He crouched down and threw both sides back, revealing a wooden hatch in the stone floor underneath. “Here! Come on!”
Nick yanked open the hatch and pointed his MP7 down the hole, ready to shoot first this time, but all he saw was a ladder leading down into darkness.
CHAPTER 24
Nick dropped down off the ladder into a narrow tunnel hewn from the bloodred rock of the citadel hill. Stone block pillars held the weight of the ceiling, spaced two meters apart along the walls and extending as far as his white tac light could reach in either direction.
“Which way?” asked Drake, dropping off the ladder.
Nick shook his head. “Didn’t see him.”
“What’s going on, One?” Static shrouded Scott’s voice, interference from the tons of earth and stone above them.
Nick covered one ear so that he could hear the engineer better. “The target from the university showed up. He dropped a mini flash bang and disappeared into a tunnel under the shop. Find out what this place is.”
There was a long pause. “I called up the archaeological records of Ankara. You must be in a cellar of some kind. There are no tunnels beneath the citadel.”
Nick squinted at the gloom beyond his light. “I beg to differ.”
“We’ve got to move if we want to catch him,” prompted Drake, switching his tac light to white as well. “Do we split up?”
“Negative. We take this guy together.” Nick stuck his index finger in his mouth and then held it out into the center of the tunnel for a few seconds. “This way,” he said, nodding to his front. “There’s a breeze.” He wiped his finger on his pants, raised his weapon to his shoulder, and started forward.
Drake followed behind. “I can’t believe you just did that. Who are you, Daniel Boone?”
“You have a better idea?”
“No.”
“Then shut up.”
After a few paces, Nick’s beam illuminated a wall at the end of the arches.
Drake let out a short sigh. “Dead end. You picked the wrong direction, Mr. Boone.”
Nick nodded and began to turn, but then he felt a breath of air tickle the sweat on his neck. He quickly shut off his light, motioning for Drake to do the same.
“That’s not a dead end,” he whispered, leading his teammate forward in the dark, feeling his way along the tunnel wall. “It’s a ninety-degree turn.”
Without the lights, the crushing weight of the darkness pressed in, and Nick had the unsettling feeling that something waited for them on the blind side of that corner, something accustomed to the dark, something that thrived on it. The air had grown colder. The dank smell it carried had grown stronger. He paused and knelt when they reached the end of the wall, reaching back to tap Drake’s boot in slow cadence: Three, two, one…
Nick took the corner low while Drake went high. Both tac lights came on as they twisted and flung their backs against the tunnel’s far wall.
A cloaked, hooded figure hovered above them, suspended in midair. Drake fired, spitting two rounds through his MP7’s suppressor. Dust exploded from the apparition’s chest. A grotesque head rocked forward into Nick’s light.
“Hold your fire,” whispered Nick. “It’s a body.”
Drake’s eyes were pinned to the ghastly thing, hanging from a recess in the tunnel wall. “It’s not a body. It’s a mummy,” he whispered back. “I hate mummies. They’re just zombies with better embalming.”
Nick panned his light down the passage. More bodies hung along the wall in arched alcoves, four feet off the floor. All of them wore tattered black robes, all were mummified so that their skin had turned gray and shrunk tight against their bones. Their eyes and mouths were sewn shut. He smiled at his teammate. “At least we know they can’t bite you.”
The passage remained narrow for a short stretch before it opened into a wide chamber. The ceiling rose to a height of at least five meters, supported by columns cut directly from the cave rock. The dead filled the walls, hanging in rows of recessed niches with their heads bowed and their arms crossed. More bodies lay on stone slabs beneath them. Some were empty, perhaps waiting for a future occupant. Directly ahead, at the far end of the chamber, was a large arched portal, leading into a black void. There were no other exits.
They crept forward with Drake in the lead, staying in the narrow aisle between the left wall and the slabs at its base. “A few of these mummies are fresher than others,” the big operative whispered, shining his light on the bodies on the slabs. “I think the Hashashin are still embalming their members.”