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“Uh-oh,” said Drake.

Nick quickened his pace. Then a gunshot rang out. He started running. “We’re too late! Come on!”

As they raced up to the archway, Nick motioned Drake and Rami to head around front, and then he fought his way through the fleeing crowd. The courtyard was divided into two sections by a low fence that ran right up to the double glass doors of the inner mosque. A smaller group of women in colorful hijab head scarves fled through the northern archway on the other side of the fence. Men still trapped in the courtyard by the bottleneck on their side jumped the fence and knocked some of the women down to get at the less crowded exit.

Once Nick was in the courtyard, getting through the glass doors into the mosque presented no problem. The interior had already cleared and nobody else wanted to get inside. As soon as Nick burst through the door, a short man in a suit and a gold-and-white taqiyah charged him, wagging his finger and chattering in a familiar but unintelligible Turkic dialect. Nick brushed past him, searching for the source of the gunshots.

Aside from a lectern near the rounded protrusion of the mihrab, most of the interior prayer room was wide-open space — green and gray carpet beneath a low ceiling, lit by six octagonal skylights that cut through the three floors above. Nick saw no sign of the shooter, and no cover where he might be hiding. He thought the room was empty except for the chattering imam, until he saw the shooter’s victim lying on the floor.

A sporadic trail of dark spots led from a door in the western wall to the center of the room, where Dr. Maharani lay at the intersection of two circles of sunlight, bleeding out into the cheap industrial carpet.

“Kattan was here,” said Nick as Drake and Rami appeared. “He fled the scene. Find him!”

The big operative turned back toward the front door. “On it!”

The imam stayed right at Nick’s shoulder as he crossed the room to Maharani, still chattering away. Nick pushed him away, shouting, “Call an ambulance!” But the little man kept coming. With the imam ranting in one ear and Drake calling for satellite support in the other, Nick crouched over the fallen scientist. “Where is it?” he demanded, grabbing Maharani by his bloody shirt. “Where is the bioweapon?”

Maharani stared up at him with wild eyes. “Smallpox,” he gasped. “Hemorrhagic. Resilient form.”

Nick raised him off the floor by his shirt. “Listen to my question! Where is it?”

“Gone. Courier came… last night. My daughter… in danger.”

Maharani didn’t know his daughter had worked for the Hashashin. “Your daughter is safe,” Nick lied, softening his tone. “Where is Kattan?”

Maharani’s lips were turning blue. “He kept me here to make a vaccine. He… took it with him. Formula… on the computer… downstairs.”

“Stay with him. I’ll get it,” said Rami.

“Delivery method!” demanded Nick, trying to get anything he could out of the doctor before he faded completely.

Maharani’s eyes fluttered closed, “My… daughter… ”

“I told you. Your daughter is fine,” said Nick, slapping the biochemist’s cheek to wake him up.

The doctor’s eyes opened. “D… C… ” Then his pupils lost their focus. With his last desperate breaths he made W sounds, trying to form a word that never came.

Drake reported in. “We’ve got nothing on satellite or the street cams. Kattan is gone.”

Nick laid the lifeless Maharani down on the carpet. Then he turned on the chattering imam. “I know you speak English, you little—”

A blast ripped through the mosque. Smoke billowed out from the stairwell where Rami had descended. Forgetting the babbling imam, Nick rushed into the choking cloud. “Rami! Rami, where are you?”

The carnage that greeted him when he reached the base of the stairs was too much for Nick to take. His eyes burned, but forcing them open, he saw that the blast in the confined space had been devastating. There was no broken body, no graceful, silent form like the girl the night before. There was nothing left of his friend and mentor but small, half-recognizable pieces.

Nick trudged back up the stairs, numb. Halfway to the top, his phone chimed. With a shaking hand, he checked the screen. The ivory letters in the black box taunted him. The Emissary has taken your bishop. Your move.

CHAPTER 59

Nick emerged from the stairwell in a trance, the walking dead. Visual and auditory cues could not make it through the wall barring the way to his conscious mind.

The little imam met him at the top of the steps and resumed his barrage of unintelligible chatter. He fell in step, right at Nick’s shoulder, completely oblivious to his own peril.

In his semiconscious state, Nick could not hear the grating buzz of the imam’s chatter nor see the constant wagging of his finger. He might not have noticed him at all, despite the little man’s complete disregard for the sanctity of personal space, but then the imam took hold of his arm.

The reaction was instantaneous and supremely violent. Nick came out of his trance with an angry roar, lifting the imam off the carpet by the lapels of his jacket and slamming him into the wall so hard that his shoulder blades broke through the drywall. The taqiyah skullcap fell to the floor. “You permitted this!” Nick shouted. “You hid the devil in your church, and now you’re going to pay!”

The shock at Nick’s sudden outburst quickly wore off, and the imam’s surprised expression melted into a sneer. “The signs of the Mahdi are preordained,” he said in perfect English. “You cannot stop his coming.” Then he spat in Nick’s face.

Nick let out another roar and hauled back his fist, but a strong hand caught his arm before he let the punch fly.

“We have to get out of here,” said Drake.

The sound of sirens and screeching tires close at hand broke through the wall in Nick’s senses, but he refused to let go of the imam. He dragged him across the prayer room by his collar instead. A growing crowd of bobbies pounded on the front door. Drake had thrown the dead bolts to keep them at bay.

“Leave him!” called Drake holding the courtyard door open.

“No! He’s one of them!”

The little imp screamed and flailed and dug his heels into the carpet like a stubborn child. Then he gained his feet and managed to turn and bite Nick’s wrist, digging his teeth deep into his flesh. Nick let out a guttural cry and let go. The imam ran toward the door and the policemen. Drake grabbed Nick’s arm and pulled him out the opposite side.

The next sixty seconds were a blur. Nick saw little besides Drake’s broad back ahead of him — an iron gate kicked in, flashes of cobblestone and pavement, a narrow street and a honking horn. There was a short tunnel of gray stone and then sunlight again and a crumbling cherub above a pair of tall oak doors, cracked and weathered. One of the doors opened and Drake pulled him onward, until he dragged him down a set of worn stone steps into darkness.

The two of them stood panting side by side in the gloom for a few seconds, and then Nick exploded.

“Get away from me!” He shoved Drake backward into the shadows beyond the foot of the stairs. The big operative fell against the opposite wall and something shifted in the dark. Stone ground against stone.

Drake recovered his balance, pushing off the object and holding out his palms. “Take it easy, boss.”

Nick did not heed the warning. “I said, get away!” He lunged at his teammate, throwing a right hook at the face he could barely see.

Drake raised his forearms to block the right as well as the left that followed. Then he wrapped Nick in a clinch and held him fast, his big hands pressing down on the back of Nick’s skull.