CHAPTER 25
While Drake climbed the footholds to test the stone hatch, Nick’s eyes drifted around the dark chamber. The walls were flat and bare. There was no furniture except for a wide circular pedestal that rose from the floor, perhaps serving as a table. He moved closer and knelt next to it, running his fingers along the side. He felt the indentations of script spiraling down from top to bottom.
“What’ve you got?” asked Drake, pressing his shoulders up against the heavy stone.
“I don’t know. Verses of some kind.”
Drake let out a long grunt. The hatch moved, but not far. He relaxed and it settled back into place. “Verses from the Quran?”
Nick used the glow of his smartphone screen to examine his find. “I don’t think so. Usually Quranic verses are written in Arabic. This appears to be Farsi.”
“You mean Iranian.”
“I mean Persian, and that’s not a language in my skill set.” He walked around the table, taking pictures. “We’ll have to get these translated.”
When he finished with the verses, Nick moved his light to the top of the pedestal. There were more carvings — a series of five symbols, four at the points of the compass and a larger one at the center, worn smooth and partially erased by time. Each was a simple shape or combination of shapes within a circle. Two of them matched the tattoos Nick had seen on his Hashashin targets.
He recognized the nearest of the four minor symbols as the double crescent moon worn by the incarnation of Ayan Ashaq, now lying dead a few feet away. The next around the circle was a combination of two triangles with their points overlapping, and the next a sort of sawtooth with a narrow base. The fourth symbol was nothing more than a horizontal crescent moon, its points directed downward.
Nick also recognized the fifth symbol, the larger one at the center of the table. Despite the wear of the stone, he could see the remnant of a crescent moon and an eight-pointed star, just like the tattoo on the man from Budapest and the DC bombing. Its honored position on this pedestal solidified what Nick already suspected. The man bearing that mark was in charge. He had to be the Emissary.
“Hey, professor,” said Drake, growing impatient in his awkward perch. “We can move this hatch if we both push together. You coming or what?”
No one spoke when the team finally reached its three-room hotel suite in downtown Ankara. Against the objections of his teammates, Nick had kept them out an additional hour after they escaped from the catacombs, driving a preplanned surveillance-detection route to make sure they weren’t followed.
Nick went straight to his room and shut the door, dropping his gear on the floor and collapsing onto his bed without bothering to undress.
He slept fitfully, his dreams full of half-decayed corpses in black robes, reaching for him out of a murky black ether. When he woke in the dim hour before sunrise, he couldn’t move, trapped in that place where the mind is awake but the body is not. The feeling of an evil presence weighed heavily on his senses. The curtain fluttered. The silhouette of a hooded man materialized in the corner next to the window, its edges bleeding into the shadows around it.
Though he tried to call out, Nick could not speak. He could not utter a sound. His MP7 lay on the floor, not three feet from his left hand, but he could not move to grab it.
The shadow glided to the foot of the bed, reaching into its cloak with a skeletal black hand.
Nick fought against his paralysis until all at once his voice and body broke free. He cried out with something between a growl and a scream and rolled over to grab his weapon.
When he rolled back to fire, he saw nothing but an empty wall.
Drake burst through the bedroom door with his Beretta in hand, but he stopped short, his eyes flitting from the weapon in Nick’s hands to the blank wall under his crosshairs. He blinked. “You… um… have a call on Scott’s video setup. It’s CJ.” The big operative watched Nick until he lowered the MP7. Then he slid his Beretta into his waistband and walked out of the room.
Both Scott and Drake eyed Nick with curiosity as he crossed the suite to their temporary computer station. Nick said nothing. He did not want to discuss it.
He sat down in front of a live telecom image of CJ on the center of three laptops. “You have something for me?”
“You look like death warmed over,” said the FBI agent, scrunching up her face.
“It’s the SATCOM link. It adds ten years. Come on. Don’t keep me in suspense.”
The FBI agent squinted at Nick for a second longer, but then she clicked her mouse and a photograph replaced her face on the screen. “We had to outsource to some folks at the National Archives,” she said, “but we finally restored that photograph from the bombing.”
Nick took in a breath. Except for some small discoloration and fading, he could swear he was looking at an unburned photo. He would never have thought that kind of restoration possible, not after seeing the damage done to the original.
The picture was clearly a surveillance photo, from the chest up, taken with a telephoto lens. The younger version of Nick was looking off camera. He tried to place the drab urban scene in the background, but the flat mud structures looked like any number of villages in the Middle East.
“Ring any bells?” asked CJ.
Nick shrank the picture with his mouse and moved it into the corner of the screen. “Give me a little time. It will come to me.”
“Time is something we don’t have. The president is certain that another attack is imminent, and I have nothing to give him. Please tell me you haven’t been gallivanting around Eastern Europe for two days only to come up empty-handed.”
“I wouldn’t call it empty-handed.” Nick told her about their fight in the catacombs. “We found script that may be useful,” he said, plugging his phone into the laptop, “along with some symbols that match our mystery tattoos. I’m sending you the pictures.”
CJ wasn’t impressed. “Cave drawings and mummies, huh?” She shook her head. “You’re slipping, Nick Baron. And another thing — your buddy Senator Cartwright is getting more persistent. I’ve got one of his staffers banging on my door every couple of hours. It’s like they’re taking shifts. I’ve blocked them with special access orders, but that won’t last. He’s on the Intelligence Oversight Committee.”
“My team isn’t under that committee,” said Nick.
“Well, mine is,” she countered. “And I told you about Cartwright’s White House connection. In another forty-eight hours, he’ll have all the clearances he needs.”
Nick didn’t want to hear about the idiot politicians. He pushed her back on track. “I sent you a text from the room where we entered the tunnels. Did you get it?”
She cocked her head. “Random picture with a ‘who and where’ attached? Yeah, I got it. How should I know who that is?”
“I’m tired, CJ.”
“Fine. Be that way. His name is Dr. Nashak Maharani. It took our software under an hour to come up with a match. We also know the where. International Biological Engineering. The good doctor is a molecular biologist.” She paused and leaned closer to the screen. “Nick, he’s noted for his achievements in genetically modified viruses.”
Drake appeared at Nick’s shoulder. “Bingo, we have a winner. That confirms we’re facing a bio-attack.”
A torso in a black suit, made headless by the limits of the webcam, approached CJ’s desk. The suit handed her a note and she looked up and said a few words that the microphone didn’t pick up. Then he moved offscreen again. CJ turned back to the monitor. “We got a video hit on your tattoo from Budapest.”