Nick came to a complete stop and looked up at his teammate. “Why would they pretend to bring the lab equipment to KVI?”
Before Drake could respond they heard a muted boom like far off thunder. The ground beneath their feet rumbled.
“The seismic alarms in the towers just tripped,” said Scott. “The elevators are locking down on their own.”
Another explosion sounded, and then another and another in rhythmic cadence. The Fishman Zeller towers visibly shook. The pedestrians in the square stumbled back and stared as glass fell from the atrium windows.
“Come on!” shouted Nick, and the two operatives ran toward the buildings.
CHAPTER 37
Nick and Drake pushed their way through the flood of suits pouring from the lobby. Periodic explosions still sounded from the sublevel — one every couple of seconds like artificial aftershocks. Smoke and dust billowed up through vents in the floor, and glass rained down from the bridges that crisscrossed the atrium above.
Nick spied an elderly man lying on the gray marble floor, bleeding from a deep gash in his thigh. He sent Drake to help and kept searching for wounded. Deeper in, a young woman in a white blouse and black business skirt stood frozen in fear, her knees pressed together and her hands spread out, trying to maintain her balance on the quaking floor. For a split second, she locked eyes with Nick. Then a final blast, an explosion that dwarfed all the rest, ripped through the floor, heaving granite tiles upward on a wave of concrete that launched the woman into the air. She came crashing down on Nick’s side of the fissure and screamed in pain. As the echo of the blast settled, there was a rending and cracking of stone. The gap behind the girl began to widen.
Nick ran toward her and dove flat out onto the broken floor, catching her hand before the cave-in swallowed her whole. Wasting no time, he pulled her up and hoisted her over his shoulder and then sprinted for the exit with the floor collapsing at his heels.
As he emerged from the thick cloud of dust into the haze on the plaza, Nick heard a strange command.
“Set her down, mate. Nice and easy.”
He slowed to a jog and then a walk, still a little disoriented. A dark-haired individual materialized to his right, tracking him with the short barrel of a Glock compact. He wore a suit and overcoat much like Nick’s and held up a badge with an eight-pointed star and a crown. The badge made him Metro Police. The Glock made him Special Branch, a superbobby. Regular bobbies carried Tasers.
Nick kept walking. The woman had lost her shoes in the explosion, and he did not want to set her down on the broken glass that littered the square in front of the building.
“I said set her down, mate.”
Convinced by the constable’s behavior that Nick meant her harm, the woman started to thrash, kicking her feet and pounding his back with her fists. Nick bore the abuse and the threat from the Glock until he reached clear ground next to the gaudy fake monument. As soon as he set her down, she turned and limped away into the growing crowd.
“You’re welcome,” Nick said flatly. Then he turned to survey what was left of the building. The dust cloud still hovered, obscuring the first floor. Every window on the second floor had shattered, along with several more on the floors above. A few more accountants and stockbrokers stumbled out over the piles of glass, beating the dust from their expensive suits and squinting at the sunlight.
“Oi! Mate! Hands where I can see ’em.”
Oh, right. The superbobby. Nick turned to face his accuser, not certain how rescuing a woman from a disaster area warranted the threat of deadly force. Then he became aware that Drake was right next to him.
“What’s his problem?” he muttered to his teammate, raising his hands.
“Your answer is at nine o’clock,” Drake replied, raising his own hands, “coming in hot.”
Nick looked left in time to get slapped in the face by Chaya Maharani. Tears streamed down the lawyer’s cheeks. “What have you done?”
“Oi! Doesn’t anyone care about the man with the gun?” asked the constable, clipping his badge to his belt.
Nick and Drake glanced at each other and then back at the Brit. “No,” they replied in unison.
“I told you,” said Chaya, turning her anger on the policeman. “They’re Interpol. They’re chasing the terrorists who kidnapped my father.”
A pair of uniformed bobbies in yellow reflective jackets closed in with their batons drawn and motioned Chaya back. They patted the two Americans down and removed the Beretta Nanos from the holsters under each man’s shoulder. One of them found Nick’s ID wallet and tossed it to the plainclothesman.
The superbobby flipped it open and frowned at the badge. “Right. Interpol. The thing is, if Interpol was chasing terrorists in London, they would have coordinated with Counter Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard. And if they had coordinated with CTC, then I would know all about it.”
“You’re SO15,” said Nick.
“That’s right. And if you’re Interpol, then Bob here is the Prince of Wales.”
Drake gave a little curtsy to the uniformed constable next to him. “Your Majesty.”
Nick’s phone chimed. He looked his captor in the eye. “I’m going to get that.”
The plainclothesman raised his gun in protest, but Nick retrieved his phone anyway. On the screen, he saw another message in the ivory letters of his chess app. The Emissary has put you in check.
Even as he lowered the phone, the general murmur of the crowd on the square shifted. Heads turned from the shattered towers to the London Stock Exchange next door. Nick glanced over his shoulder and through the tall windows he could see all the numbers on the giant ticker display turning red. Every stock plummeted. One of the verses CJ had sent him jumped to the front of his mind. And the marketplace will erupt in turmoil. “Something bad is about to happen.”
“Something bad indeed,” said the plainclothesman, tucking his Glock into its holster and closing the distance to the Americans. “You two are under arrest.”
One of the bobbies reached for Nick’s wrist. He jerked it away.
“Easy, mate.” The bobby reached for him again, slower this time.
Nick’s eyes remained fixed on the ticker. The stocks kept falling. Cell phones were ringing all over the square. People were shouting inside the exchange. Suddenly all the numbers disappeared. Red dots flew in from all sides of the ticker and formed a slowly flashing message: NOW BEAR WITNESS TO THE SECOND SIGN.
Then the message stopped flashing and faded, replaced by a countdown from ten. Several people in the crowd counted with it. “Nine!”
“Fishman Zeller wasn’t the target,” said Nick as the bobby drew his hands together in front of him and locked them in steel cuffs. “It was the London Stock Exchange. And if they have control of the tickers, they must control…” His voice faded and his eyes drifted up to the top of the fake Corinthian column. A wisp of smoke rose skyward from the gilded rim. “The server room.”
“Six!” Most of the crowd was now treating the countdown like an early New Year’s. The explosions were all but forgotten. Pockets of laughter erupted all over the square.
Idiots.
“Get back!” shouted Nick. He slammed his shoulder into the plainclothesman’s chest, lifting the Glock from its holster with his cuffed hands and firing it into the air. Then he leveled the weapon and turned in a circle. “Get away from the column! Get back! Get back!”
The tactic worked. Those nearest to the column stopped counting and backed away. One of the bobbies pulled Chaya into the crowd, trying to protect her from the crazed American.
As he heard the crowd count, “Three!” Nick dropped the gun and rushed the constable, Drake at his side. The two of them lifted the SO15 man by the armpits and dragged him toward the middle of the square.