“His son was twelve years old. He was an American citizen.” Early in the Kattan chase, they had learned about his affair with a woman in New York. They knew about the boy, Masih, but they had no record of him ever going to Yemen.
Drake waved his hands. “Kattan is the one who brought the kid out there. That’s on him. We didn’t know.”
“But we knew afterward. We should have tried to recover the boy’s body. We owed him that much.” Nick laid his head back again and stared up at the cabin ceiling.
The CIA had operated its remotely piloted aircraft in Yemen with the consent of the Yemeni government, but there were compromises in the deal. One of those was the sanctity of Muslim bodies after a strike. The CIA could not touch them. The remains had to be left for the Yemeni authorities to collect for proper burial. All the Agency could do was montior the removal and hope they got enough video to confirm that a target was dead. Once the bodies were out of sight, the word of the local coroner would be highly suspect.
But Nick and Drake were not bound by any international agreement. They were not CIA, and the Yemeni government had no knowledge of their presence. They could have reached the target area before the local authorities arrived. They could have confirmed the death of the child. Instead, still numb from the strike, Nick and Drake had packed up and left.
“I didn’t want to see that boy up close,” said Nick. “I didn’t want that image locked in my head for the rest of my life.”
“I know,” said Drake. “I didn’t either.”
“But if we had, if we had gone down there and checked the bodies”—Nick rolled his head left to look his teammate in the eye—“we would have realized the kid was still alive.”
The team left the Gulfstream in a hangar at London City Airport and set up shop in a two-bedroom apartment at Cygnet House, in Greenwich.
“Why do I always get the couch?” complained Scott, setting up a spiny SATCOM antenna on the balcony. Despite the cold, he wore only a lime green T-shirt with his jeans. Block lettering on the front said: I’M SMARTER THAN YOUR BOYFRIEND.
Nick was running the antenna’s cable along the baseboards behind the couch in question. “Because your room has to be the command center, and the command center has to be in the living room. Do you want me to put Drake in charge of your equipment?”
Scott winced. “Absolutely not.”
“Then quit complaining.” Nick secured the cable to the back of one of Scott’s three laptops with a multi-tool and then stood up, slipping the tool into the leg pocket of his cargo pants. He brushed the dust off the long sleeves of his black thermal and turned to face the engineer. “What are we doing about Masih Kattan?”
The engineer cast one more wary look at the frayed couch cushions and then waved Nick back from the computers, out of his way. “While you two were lounging on the plane, I was back in the workstation getting us a head start.” He sat down and tapped at a wireless keyboard, bringing all three laptops to life. Two of the screens showed freeze-frames of their Budapest target, one captured from Raven’s satellite footage and the other from the camera at Heathrow airport. The third screen showed a facial sketch that Scott had built from Nick’s description. “I took what surveillance images we had and fed them into the same program that helped you identify Grendel. Neither caught the subject’s face. For that, I had to depend on our sketch. So the digital profile is much less complete.”
“Nice pick on the digs, boss,” interrupted Drake, emerging from his bedroom. He wore a loud, orange and yellow Hawaiian shirt, the one he called his relaxation shirt. He grinned at Scott. “Who knew you could find a California king in jolly old England. That baby is already calling my name.”
Nick ignored him and pressed the engineer. “So you’re saying our chances of finding Kattan are slim.”
Scott shrugged. “If I set the program to scan the feeds from London’s traffic and rail-station cams, we might get lucky. The tattoo will be the clincher. The software is set to view anyone with the same mark as a dead match. London has a lot of cameras. Kattan can’t hide forever.”
“No, but we don’t have forever to find him. We need to locate this Dr. Maharani and find out what he knows.” Nick grabbed his satchel from the couch and turned toward his room. As he did, the photo he had found at the knife shop fell onto the cushion. He picked it up, and for the first time he noticed a handwritten equation on the back.
632,000 × 0.05 = 31,600
— 31,600
600,400
The final number was circled.
“Hey, I know what that equation means,” said Drake, looking over Nick’s shoulder. He pointed to the first number. “This is a population figure before an outbreak. The subtracted amount represents potential survivors. Five percent is the standard estimation of people who will be immune to a virus.”
“How could you possibly know that?” argued Scott.
“Zombie apocalypse,” countered Drake, folding his arms. “Every prepper takes it for granted that he’s part of the five percent. It’s the only hope we have.”
“Finally we get something useful out of your ridiculous hobby.”
“It is not a hobby, it is survival.”
Nick snapped his fingers at his teammates. “Focus, please.” He held the picture in front of Drake’s nose. “What does the last number mean, the one that’s circled?”
Drake shrugged. “That’s the fatality estimate, the number of people the virus will kill.”
Nick pushed past him and slapped the photo down next to Scott’s computers. “I’ve been carrying around the answer to one of our biggest questions for hours, and I had no idea. Scott, how many cities have a population of 632,000?”
The engineer clicked at his keyboard and quickly came up with a result. “A few,” he said, rolling out of the way so that Nick and Drake could see the screen.
Only one result from the short list of cities stood out to Nick. Only one made any sense. “These numbers tell us the target for the bio-attack,” he said, picking up the photograph again. “They tell us it’s Washington, DC.”
CHAPTER 28
Drake regarded his phony Interpol ID with a sour look, rubbing his thumb across the brass shield. Crammed into the right seat of the rented Peugeot hatchback, the big operative could easily have passed for Gulliver in Lilliput. Like Nick, he had exchanged his grunge clothes for business attire appropriate to the Interpol persona, and the overcoat he wore only amplified his disproportionate appearance in the small car. “Why Drake Martignetti?”
“It’s Italian. It suits you.”
“I’m Greek.”
“Who can tell? You Mediterranean types all look the same.”
Nick adjusted the dials of a microwave camera sitting on the dash, tuning an image of Maharani’s three-story Kensington row house that a USB cable fed to a tablet computer on his lap. The video feed looked something like an ultrasound, assuming the doctor conducting the ultrasound was drunk. Intel techs often likened interpreting microwave video to interpreting chicken entrails.
“I don’t like this,” said Drake.
“It’s too late to get a new cover name.”
“Not the name, the plan. We need to take a step back and stake this guy out for a couple of days. If the doctor’s working for Kattan, we might be walking into another firefight.”
“We don’t have a couple of days. And there’s no ambush here.” Nick lifted the tablet so that Drake could see. He pointed to a green, vaguely human-shaped blob, undulating across the first floor. “I see one guy, probably Maharani. You have to trust the equipment.”
“Right. Because microwave is so dependable.” Drake flipped the Interpol ID wallet closed with a slap. “I don’t look Italian at all.”