He sat forward and flipped through the pages again, coming to rest on a picture of two cloaked men in peaked helmets. They carried curved scimitars and glared at each other with their pointed beards nearly touching. “Hulegu tells us that in the year 1120, Hassan reached the precarious pinnacle of his career. His society of assassins had hundreds of murders to its credit—”
“But still no Mahdi,” interrupted Drake.
Rami smiled. “High marks for you, Mr. Merigold.” He placed his elbows on the desk on either side of the text and steepled his fingers. “Hassan’s only option was to fabricate a Mahdi. He paraded a child around his mountain stronghold as the incarnation of the twelfth imam and then hid him away and declared the Qiyamah had begun.” The Egyptian grinned like a car salesman and spread his arms wide. “Welcome to paradise! Now get back to work. Of course, Hassan remained the Qaim, the assassinations continued, and no one ever saw the child again.”
“Great story,” said Drake, growing impatient again, “but what does that have to do with our Hashashin terrorists?”
Rami brought his hands together with a startling clap. “I’m so glad you asked!” He laid a finger on one of the bearded men in the illustration. “This is General Insar, a foot soldier who survived too many suicide missions. He didn’t buy Hassan’s lies and started squawking about it among the faithful. When Hassan tried to arrange his death, Insar challenged him and killed him and then fled with his followers to another mountain fortress.”
“The Ankara Citadel,” said Drake.
Rami abruptly looked up from the book. “High marks again, Mr. Merigold! You’re much smarter than Nicholas gives you credit for.”
Drake opened his mouth to respond, but the professor kept going before any words came to him.
“Insar formed an unsteady alliance with one of the late Hassan’s rivals, the Sultan of Rum — sort of an enemy-of-my-enemy arrangement. His splinter group of Hashashin, the Insari, lived and thrived at Ankara for a hundred years, making their living openly as assassins and blacksmiths and waiting for the return of the real Mahdi.”
“Who, once again, never came.”
The professor raised a pair of bushy eyebrows. “They never got the chance to find out. The whole group was wiped out in 1242. The new sultan saw them as a threat and sent a huge army to Ankara in a preemptive strike.” He closed the book and sat back again, removing his glasses. “According to Hulegu, the sultan’s army finished off the Insari Hashashin, but at great cost. Five thousand men marched on Ankara. Only two hundred returned.”
Drake narrowed his eyes. “If the sultan wiped out the Hashashin in the thirteenth century,” he asked, “then who did we fight in those catacombs last night?”
Rami shrugged. “Why should we trust the word of the sultan’s men? Perhaps a remnant of the Hashashin survived at Ankara, living in secret all this time as assassins for hire. There are rumors of it all throughout history. Can every one of them be false?”
“That would mean the Insari Hashashin are remarkably adept at keeping to the shadows, even in the modern world. They’ve purposefully stepped out into the light. Why now, after eight centuries? What changed?”
The professor pressed one stem of his glasses to his chin, his face clouded in thought. After several seconds, his eyes focused again, and he shook the glasses at Drake. “They must have found another Qaim, another Hassan more convincing than the original.”
The word Qaim stuck in Drake’s brain. “You mentioned Hassan pretending to be the Qaim before. What did you say it meant?”
“Al-Qaim,” said the professor, slipping his glasses back on. “In English, ‘the ambassador.’” He seated his frames and looked across the desk at Drake. “Or perhaps more accurately, ‘the emissary.’”
CHAPTER 33
British food had always mystified Nick. How could the nation credited with the invention of the sandwich be utterly incapable of producing a basic ham and cheese? He dumped the caramelized onions off a dubious adaptation of a chicken club and then considered dipping the sandwich in his Americano. That might at least soften the hard roll, which promised to go down like broken glass.
Across the table, Chaya drummed the Formica with manicured nails and stared out the café window at the Strand. “You said the IBE security video was a major breakthrough.”
“It was.”
“Then what are you doing?”
Nick slowly chewed a bite of sandwich, grinding the stiff crust between his teeth until it was safe to swallow. “I’m eating.”
Chaya muttered something in Hindi and pounded the table with her fist, sending a spatter of Nick’s coffee onto the sleeve of his overcoat. He leisurely dabbed it away with a napkin.
Behind the stolid expression, Nick was just as impatient as she was. The security video from IBE showed Kattan’s face from multiple angles, their biggest lead yet. Now they had a complete digital profile along with fixed points in time and space to feed into London’s public-camera system, the largest Big Brother network in the world. Finding Kattan was only a matter of time, but Nick couldn’t go back to the hotel to prepare to go after him — not yet, not with the lawyer in tow.
As he struggled to masticate his third bite of sandwich, Nick’s comm unit finally crackled to life. “Are you there, One?”
Nick raised the phone to his ear to conceal that he was talking through the earpiece. “I’m here,” he said to Scott. “Did you get it?”
“I hope you know how many international laws I had to break.”
“Which makes this no different than any other day. Where to?”
“Take the Piccadilly Line from Holborn. Head for Piccadilly Circus.”
“On my way.”
Nick slapped a lid on his coffee and started for the door, leaving the sandwich languishing in its wrapping. Chaya scrambled out from behind the table to follow. “Your friend has something?”
“I have to get to Piccadilly Circus.”
As soon as Nick hit the sidewalk, he extended his stride, forcing the short lawyer into a stilted jog. The Strand and Kingsway were crowded with lunchtime foot traffic, and he weaved his way through the oncoming droves, picking the path of most resistance. He could hear the uneven click of Chaya’s power heels behind him, her panting apologies as she bumped into the people he sidestepped. Nick found it difficult not to smile.
When they came within sight of Holborn station, he felt the lawyer’s fingers graze his back, grasping for him. “You’re taking the Tube?” she asked, out of breath. “It will be packed at this hour. We should walk it.”
“No time. The Tube is still faster. Besides”—he stepped onto the steep escalator descending into the station—“I’m a government employee, remember? I have to support the public-transit system.”
Chaya clutched the arm rail on the step above him, gasping for breath. “You’re not an employee of our government.”
A cloud of static grew on Nick’s comm link as the escalator took them deeper underground. “I’m going to piggyback on the Tube’s cell-phone repeaters to keep the link open,” said Scott through the interference. “Once you’re on the train, give me an execute signal. After that you’ll have only a ninety-second window, encompassing both stages. Will that be enough?”
“Should be.”
Chaya looked up from straightening her rumpled coat. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
Chaya’s concerns about the noontime traffic proved to be well-founded. The platform was packed. Nick jostled his way to the map on the back wall. “Which train?”
“All of them, you stupid Yank,” said Chaya, scrunching her nose. “All the trains that pass this platform go to Piccadilly Circus.”