“Where?” asked Nick and Drake in stereo.
“An airport cam at Heathrow, ten hours ago. Just a glimpse of the mark itself, though, no face. Two significant flights came in around that time, one from Cairo, one from Jordan. My guys pulled the customs feeds, but no dice.”
“Ten hours,” muttered Nick.
“Suck it up, princess,” retorted CJ. “Legitimate government agencies like mine have to follow rules, file paperwork. Ten hours is some kind of record. You should be singing my praises.”
“So do we go after Maharani or Tattoo Guy?” asked Drake.
“Both. The bioresearch firm that Maharani works for is also in London. I’m guessing that’s no coincidence.”
Nick looked back at Scott. “Call our pilot. Have him warm up the jet. Start packing the gear.”
“Hey! I’m not finished.” CJ tapped her screen to reclaim his attention. “Maharani’s a start, but I need more. The picture showing up at the bombing tells me our quarry is someone from your past. You’ve seen his face twice so far. You have to dig down and try to remember him. You have to tell me who we’re up against.”
Nick glanced down at the picture in the corner of the screen. In the photo, he was younger, several years at least. He shook his head. “The man I saw was young, early twenties. If I was chasing him when this picture was taken, then I was chasing a teenager—”
He stopped. That was it. Suddenly he saw the face of the Budapest killer — the face of the mystery man at the DC bombing — in a new light. He knew the identity of the Emissary.
PART TWO
GAMBIT
CHAPTER 26
Hatchet, this is Zombie One. Confirm you saw the target enter the building?” asked Nick, pressing a button on the fat comm unit hanging from his ear. He turned to Drake, who was lying prone right next to him. “I’m not letting you pick our callsigns anymore.”
They were crammed into a crevice in the side of a sandy hill, watching a mud house in a tiny desert village. Kattan had crossed from Iraq into Saudi Arabia, and then through the desert mountains into western Yemen. They had been on his trail for months. It was hot, it was stuffy, and they were surrounded by some of the biggest flies Nick had ever seen. He wondered if he smelled as offensive to Drake as Drake smelled to him.
“Zombie, affirmative,” said the pilot of the drone circling above, high and out of sight. The CIA Predator-B was a limited production model of the Air Force MQ-9 Reaper, able to carry eight times the munitions of the original Predator. “Your target is inside. There are two sentries. One on the east side of the structure, the other on the west.”
Colonel Walker’s voice interrupted through Nick’s satellite comm link, much more clear and crisp than the voice of the pilot relayed through the Predator-B’s five-watt radio. “Zombie, this is Lighthouse. The risk of collateral damage has been assessed low. A strike on the building is approved. Do not wait for the target to leave. I repeat: do not wait for the target to leave. This is our best chance to take him down.”
Everything had come together for this strike. The CIA asset had confirmed Kattan’s presence, and it was carrying the best surgical strike weapon that current technology could provide — a dual GPS/laser-guided bomb called a GBU-54. The new bomb wasn’t even fielded with regular units yet. At five hundred pounds, it was big enough to do the jobs that a Hellfire missile couldn’t, and small enough to minimize collateral damage in a village like this one.
The numbers, the intelligence, the timing, all the data told Nick that striking now was the right move.
He checked the hardened laptop that Drake held open beside him. The high-definition video feed from the Predator-B showed the house and the two sentries in perfect clarity. “Hatchet, Zombie, I will be your tactical controller for this strike,” said Nick. “Keep your laser cold. I’ll take care of terminal guidance. Your aim point is the center of the house. I want one GBU-54 and one only. Call in with direction.”
“Hatchet copies one bomb and one only. Laser cold.” There was a long pause while the drone pilot lined his aircraft up for the attack run and then, “Hatchet is in from the north.”
Nick checked the video one more time. Then he squinted through the scope of his laser designator, adjusted his crosshairs, and flipped on the beam. “Hatchet, you are cleared hot,” he said into the radio.
The moment Nick spoke those words, the door on the south side of the structure opened and a boy walked toward a nearby water pump. It took Nick a long moment to process the unexpected sight. Instinctively, he backed away from the scope. The wider view with his naked eye confirmed the newcomer was way too short to be one of the sentries.
“Abort, abort, abort!”
“Too late, Zombie. The weapon is away, tracking your laser. Time of flight now twenty seconds.”
Unaware of the danger, the boy went about his business. He hung a pail on the end of the pump and started working the handle.
Nick lost sight of the kid as he returned to his scope and started dragging his crosshairs into the desert. He moved the weapon’s laser aim point toward his own position. It was the only direction he could shift the bomb without endangering another house in the village.
“Ten seconds.”
“Take cover!” Nick reached blindly behind him, motioning for his teammate to move deeper into the crevice. “I’m bringing the bomb closer to our hill.”
“You’re what?”
“Five seconds.” The Reaper pilot’s voice remained even, almost robotic.
“Just get back!”
Nick knew that shifting a GBU was a long shot. The bomb’s flight controls could not handle large changes with the laser spot. If he did not move the aim point far enough away, the house and the kid would still be inside the blast radius. If he moved it too far, too quickly, the bomb’s logic would reject the laser signal and revert to GPS.
“Three, two, one… ”
The impact shook the earth, threatening to bring the whole hill down on top of them. Debris ranging from small pebbles to softball-sized rocks pummeled Nick’s back and shoulders and glanced off his Kevlar helmet. He kept his head low, waiting for the quaking to settle.
When Nick finally lifted his eyes, all he saw was a uniform curtain of light brown dust. He allowed himself a dirt-caked smile, certain he had successfully dragged the bomb closer to his own hideout.
Then Hatchet shattered the illusion.
“Splash. Direct hit on target building. Stand by for damage assessment.”
With a gust of wind, the curtain of dust swirled apart, confirming Hatchet’s report. The five-hundred-pound weapon had rejected the laser spot and reverted to the original coordinates, obliterating the mud structure.
Nick dropped into his scope and shifted it back to the water pump. At first, he could not see anything — the haze played havoc with his focus. Frantically, he rubbed his eye with a gloved knuckle and looked again.
On that second look, he found him: the young boy, lying still and bloodied in the dust.
CHAPTER 27
Hey, are you awake?” asked Drake, reaching across the Gulfstream’s aisle to poke Nick’s arm.
Nick sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes. “I’m awake. I was just replaying the Kattan strike in my head.”
“We acted on our intelligence,” said Drake. “And we had no choice. That guy engineered attacks in Iraq that killed thirty-four U.S. soldiers and more than a hundred Iraqis. He was going to do it again.”