“Hulegu.”
“You remember!” The professor clapped his hands together. “That is why you were always my favorite.”
Nick shook his head. “Hulegu employed overwhelming force. He stormed the Hashashin stronghold at Alamut with a hundred thousand Mongol warriors.” He gestured at Drake with an open hand, tracking down from the worn Hawaiian shirt to the patent leather shoes. “All I have is him, and even if we could send in the Marines, we don’t know where to send them.”
“Ah.” Rami raised a finger. “You are forgetting that Hulegu foiled multiple assassination attempts before he destroyed the Hashashin at Alamut. No one, not even the Sultan of Rum had stopped their assassinations before.”
The professor motioned Nick closer, his movements quick, energized by academic discovery. “Look here. It is difficult to find amid the rabid self-glorification, but I believe Hulegu gives us the true key to his success.” Rami placed a finger on the page and read in the voice of a pompous Mongol khan.
Having inherited the divine foresight of the eagles, I sent my informants into their houses of worship. For I had discerned by the wisdom granted to me by heaven that the Mohammedans do not separate their worship from their war. Rather they worship through war, by what they call jihad. Within the domed shrines frequented by the Ismailis, my informants discovered a network of Hashashin outposts with tunnels, secret rooms, and armories. There they learned of the plots against my brother the Great Khan Möngke and my adviser Kitbuka. Thus I laid in wait for my enemies and by my own hand met them with divine retribution for their sins.
“The mosques?” offered Drake.
“Yes. Yes!” said Rami, slapping him on the back. “Unlike the crusaders, Hulegu understood the value of infiltrating the mosques rather than burning them, at least in the early stages. And unlike today’s intelligence agencies, he did not concern himself with the political consequences of having a spy discovered in a mosque.”
Nick nodded, staring down at the page. “Eight centuries ago Hulegu discovered the heart of Islamic insurgency. ‘The Mohammedans do not separate their worship from their war,’” he read. “‘Rather, they worship through war.’ Nothing has changed. Today’s generals are just too politically correct to say it.” He tapped the illustration of the mosque. “This should have been my starting point. Instead, I let Kattan lead me around by the nose.”
Youssef entered from the hallway, interrupting their conversation. “It is time,” he said solemnly.
The academic smile on Rami’s lips faded. “You must excuse me for a while,” he said, standing up and patting Nick on the shoulder. Then he and Youssef silently walked out of the room.
Nick’s phone chimed. He checked the screen. A black box with ivory text told him The Emissary has taken your rook. Your move.
He frowned at the screen. The game was supposed to be over. CJ had captured the phone that sent Kattan’s moves. Was one of her techs playing with the program? Before Nick could fully process the ramifications, the box disappeared, replaced by an incoming call — one of the secure hard lines at Romeo Seven. He checked his watch: two A.M., DC time. Not a good sign. He pressed the green square and put the phone to his ear. “I swear I didn’t shoot the wing off that angel.”
“Nick?” The voice was Doc Heldner’s. “We’ve been trying to reach you on SATCOM.”
“We had to shut down the earpieces and let them dry. Long story, but—”
“Nick, Romeo Seven has been penetrated,” interrupted Heldner. “We’re in lockdown.”
CHAPTER 55
Nick turned on the phone’s speaker and set it down on the damp pages of Hulegu’s text. “Clarify.”
Dr. Heldner’s explanation was urgent, hurried. “Scott is back, but he’s hurt. We don’t know how, but someone or something got to him while he was at his workstation. When he arrived, I came in to give him the standard postmission workup. He was healthy, but he was agitated. He wanted to get to work on an assignment you gave him.”
Nick nodded at the phone. “Cracking the Second Sign Virus.”
“That’s it. I told him to go home and rest, but he blew me off and went straight to a workstation in the command center. I went up to the Ivory Tower to talk to Dick. A few minutes later, Scott cried out as if something hit him. We looked down in time to see him crash to the floor. Dick hit the panic button and put the bunker in lockdown.”
“Intruders?” asked Nick.
“None. None that security could find, anyway. By the time I got to Scott, he was unresponsive. His eyes are open, staring. His symptoms present like a neurotoxin.”
Drake shook his head. “No way. There’s no way the Hashashin got past base security and got into Romeo Seven. Maybe they hit him with a dart or something before he got to the airport.”
“A delayed response?” asked Heldner. “Not by seven hours. That’s not how neurotoxins work. There has to be another solution. Scott is fading fast. He may already be losing brain function. Without knowing the specific poison, I can’t administer an antidote. Nick, I’m going to lose him.”
Nick squeezed his eyes shut. The game was on again, and Kattan had taken another piece — Scott. But how? None of them ever gave away the location of the apartment, not even to Chaya. The Hashashin had no way to poison Scott before or after he escaped London.
Unless one of Nick’s own team had done it for them.
Unless he had done it himself.
“The thumb drive,” he exclaimed through his teeth. “I gave him a thumb drive that Scotland Yard found at the site of the second terrorist attack.”
On the speaker, they could hear the sound of Heldner rushing through Romeo Seven on her way from the clinic to the command center.
Nick bent closer to the phone, placing his hands on either side of the book. “Look for a partially burned thumb drive at Scott’s workstation, but be careful.”
When she reached the workstation, Heldner found the thumb drive already plugged in to one of Scott’s computers. She described micro-needles protruding from the top and bottom. “It’s not a drive at all. It’s a CO2 injector. The electricity from the USB receptacle must have activated the charge. It hit him as soon as he plugged it in.”
“Can you save him?” asked Drake.
“Maybe. If there’s enough residual toxin for me to make a positive ID, I might find a suitable antidote.” She paused and then added, “But at this point, I don’t know if there’s much of him left to save.”
After the doctor hung up, Nick and Drake stared at the blank phone for several moments. Then Nick opened up the message from his chess application and showed it to Drake.
The big operative gave him a wary look. “May I assume we’re not going home as ordered?”
“Can’t,” said Nick, pocketing the phone. “The game isn’t over yet.”
“But the thumb drive was supposed to be our next break. It’s a bust. How do we chase him now?”
“We don’t chase him. We head him off.” Nick smoothed out the wet pages of Rami’s book, tracing his fingers over the illustration of the ancient mosque. “We go to the one place we know Kattan will appear.”
CHAPTER 56
In a small rental in Hillcrest Heights, south of the beltway, a young woman with big brown eyes and a sullen disposition was dragged out of bed by a phone call from her boss. Molly had only been off for a few hours, but Colonel Walker had reopened the chase.