“Right, mind games.” But Nick wasn’t sure he bought the logic. The endgame was right here, right in front of him — infiltrate the building in Paternoster Square, take down Kattan, rescue the biochemist, secure the weapon. The path ahead seemed so cut and dry, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something.
CHAPTER 36
The building in the video, the building where Kattan disappeared, was twelve stories of glass and concrete owned by the financial conglomerate Fishman Zeller — two towers of offices, separated by a narrow glass atrium, standing at the western end of Paternoster Square. Fishman Zeller occupied all of the southern tower, but the company rented out the offices of the northern tower to smaller investment companies. Molly had done a little digging and discovered that one of those companies had a paper-thin corporate veil.
According to the Fishman Zeller records, Kingdom Ventures Incorporated was a ten-year-old Dubai investment company that opened its London offices less than a month before, leasing the entire sublevel of the northern tower — two thousand square feet of office space. Molly cross-checked KVI’s tax filings with the City of London and uncovered two classic signs of a front company with a fictional corporate history — minimal transaction volume and earnings that matched to a percentage point year over year. No investment company was that consistent.
Scott had done some digging as well. “I own their cameras, their elevators, whatever you want,” he told Nick over the comm link. “The firewalls to the tower security system were tragically easy to hack.”
Nick nodded as if Scott could see him, his phone still at his ear to mask the SATCOM conversation. From the partial concealment of a Renaissance arch on the southwest corner of the square, he surveiled the entrance between the Fishman Zeller towers. Foot traffic was light, only a few people going in or out. None of them looked like Kattan or Maharani. “Any escape routes besides the obvious?”
“Do you see the big column?”
A gaudy Corinthian column rose out of the northwest section of the square between the towers and the London Stock Exchange. With the gold-plated flaming urn at its top, it reached a height of seventy-five feet or more, and with a base at least twenty-five feet in diameter and twenty feet tall, it blocked Nick’s view of the western quarter of the exchange. “How could I miss it? Another monument to the empire.”
“Except it isn’t a monument at all,” said Scott. “You’re looking at the world’s most overdressed exhaust vent. The London Stock Exchange has a basement level that extends out beneath the square, housing a massive server room — literally thousands of networked drives. It takes some heavy-duty air-conditioning to keep all those electronics cool, and that column is really a giant stack that vents the exhaust.”
“And I care about the vent because…”
“Not so much the vent as the server room underneath it. There’s a thirty-meter utility tunnel connecting it to Fishman Zeller. The access panel is in the front hallway of KVI.”
“Kattan might run that way.”
“He might try. The good news is, the tunnel is a dead end. The exchange side is secured by a steel door, four inches thick. If Kattan tries to sneak out through the crawl space, he’ll be trapped.”
“Copy that.” Nick stared at the entrance for a few seconds. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that this was coming together too easily. “Be ready to shut down the elevators and the elevator alarms on my call. And when you have that set up, go back and look at all the footage we have of Kattan. Find me something we haven’t noticed before.”
“I’ve already been over that footage several times.”
“And I’m telling you to go over it again, every frame.” Nick’s eyes tracked another businessman leaving the Fishman Zeller towers. Like all the others he’d seen so far, this one was young, Caucasian, and not Kattan. From what he could tell, the target had not left the building, but Kattan wouldn’t stay in there forever, waiting to be caught. They needed to move. “Nightmare Two, give me an ETA.”
“Thirty seconds ago.” The voice was right behind him, not on the comm link. Drake walked beneath the arch from the cathedral side and joined Nick in the shadows against its eastern wall. “Where’s the lawyer?”
Now that he had someone visible to talk to, Nick returned his phone to his pocket, but he kept his eyes on the tower entrance. “By that, you mean where’s the hot chick?”
“You know me so well.”
“I put her on a train to get her out of the way and keep her away from you. One day you and Amanda will both thank me.”
“She went willingly?”
“Not really.” Nick slipped the strap of one of his satchels over his head and handed it to Drake. “I brought you something.”
“A European carryall? You shouldn’t have.”
“With an old friend inside.”
Drake hefted the satchel, feeling the weight of the MP7. He grinned. “A good friend.” Then he reached into his pocket. “I brought something for you, too, a gift from your old professor.” He handed Nick a small green statuette, jade by the look and feel of it. The figure was a complex geometric shape — two faceted cones that blended together and then tapered down to a narrow base. “Look familiar?”
When Nick shook his head, Drake took the figure and laid it flat in his teammate’s hand. “How about now?”
Suddenly Nick made the connection. Viewed in two dimensions, the figure matched one of the Hashashin symbols, the sawtooth with the narrow base.
“What is this thing?”
“A Persian chess piece.”
Drake related the final bit of history that Rami had shared with him. The early Muslim leaders had outlawed traditional chess sets, fearing the lifelike figurines would be worshipped as pagan idols. Cunning adherents to the game revived it by simplifying the pieces. The elephant — the precursor to the bishop — became a double crescent moon, representing the tusks. The two spires of the piece in Nick’s hand represented the two heads of chariot horses. Later, the Europeans would interpret them as castle battlements — the rook. Each of the Insari Hashashin symbols represented a chess piece. General Insar had been obsessed with the game.
Drake pulled out his phone and flipped through the symbols, explaining each one. “The overlapping triangles are the knight,” he said, “and the horizontal crescent moon is the queen.” He flipped to the last picture, the crescent moon over the eight-pointed star. “This is Kattan’s symbol. Guess which piece it represents.”
“The king,” said Nick, pushing away from the arch and starting across the square. “I guess it’s time to take him down and end the game.”
The two operatives were halfway to the tower entrance when Scott spoke up over the SATCOM. “It’s the boxes!” he exclaimed. His voice was both excited and nervous.
“We’re a little busy here,” said Nick, reaching a hand into his satchel to find the grip of his MP7. “Get ready to shut down the elevators. We’ll take the stairs down to KVI and hem them in.”
The engineer ignored the command. “You don’t understand. You were right. We missed something in the footage. The boxes, they’re empty.”
Nick released his weapon and touched Drake’s arm to slow their pace. “You’re not making any sense, Four.”
Scott gave a frustrated huff. “When Kattan and Maharani left IBE, pieces of lab equipment were sticking out of their boxes. The tops were only half-closed. When they carried them into Fishman Zeller, the tops were flat. I’m telling you, the boxes were empty.”