In his earpiece, he could still hear Drake being pummeled, grunting with pain and occasionally making a snide remark that his attackers couldn’t understand.
“Hurry!” pleaded Molly. Nick could hear the tears in her voice. “Get the nuke so you can help him!”
“Working on it.” Nick shouldered his way north through the crowd and slid into the narrow cypress grove that bordered the Dome of the Rock platform. He finally saw the Hashashin again, almost to the unguarded entrance of the mosque. In the cover of the trees, he drew his suppressed Sig Sauer pistol. He could end this right now and go back to save Drake. He lined the Hashashin up in his sights.
The moment Nick pulled the trigger, a group of civilians passed between him and the terrorist. He jerked the weapon up but it still spit out a round. A puff of dust erupted from the side of the mosque as the bullet obliterated a patch of five-hundred-year-old ceramic tile. With the noise of the riot, no one noticed.
By the time the tourists passed, the target had disappeared again. The SWARM hovered over the great gold dome.
There was a terrible crack in Nick’s earpiece. Drake let out a pained cry and then his SATCOM went totally dead.
“Drake? Molly?”
No response from either.
Nick’s phone chimed. He risked a glance at the screen.
The Emissary has taken your second knight and put you in check. Your move.
Nick growled as he put the phone away. He vaulted up onto the platform. This game was over.
A paper sign irreverently duct-taped to the mosque’s great wooden door said CLOSED FOR CELESTIAL EVENT BY ORDER OF THE WAQF AUTHORITY in three languages. Nick held his pistol tight against his chest, pulled open the heavy door, and slipped inside. Blood stained the rich green carpet just beyond the marble entrance. A third Waqf Authority guard listed to one side in his chair, a bullet hole in his head.
Nick quietly pressed deeper into the octagonal mosque. Two circles of gray-and-white columns interspersed with five-foot-long partitions formed a maze of marble around the sacred Foundation Stone at the center. They offered a good deal of cover, but they obscured his line of sight to the Hashashin.
The great rock itself jutted four feet above the floor and was surrounded by a four-foot-tall wood-and-marble fence. Above it rose the massive dome, inlaid with dizzying floral patterns in green and blue and thousands of pounds of pure gold, barely lit by a few chandeliers and the darkening sunlight seeping through blue stained-glass windows.
Creeping up behind one of the rounded partitions, Nick got eyes on the terrorist, kneeling on the Foundation Stone with a semi-automatic in his left hand. A metal suitcase lay open in front of him.
To Nick’s surprise, it was not Kattan. No matter. This guy had the nuke. Nick could find Kattan and the vaccine later. He leveled his weapon and was about to fire when he noticed a remote trigger in the terrorist’s right hand — a black oval with a red trigger underneath, no bigger than a presentation remote. Nick lowered the Sig. In the throes of death, the Hashashin might still trigger the bomb.
Nick stuffed his gun behind his back and rushed forward from the inner ring, his footsteps muted by the thick carpet. He ran in a crouch, planning to spring up and knock the trigger away.
The Hashashin stood and turned just as Nick’s feet left the carpet. Nick knocked the remote from his hand, but the terrorist caught his shoulders and threw him down on the rock. He let out a pained “Oof!” as the air left his lungs. The remote skipped across the carpet, coming to rest at the base of a marble column.
Nick took too long to recover from the fall. The Hashashin lifted him off the rock by his lapels, and before he got his hands up, the terrorist landed a cruel punch straight to his teeth.
“Infidel!” he shouted. “You cannot stop this. The signs have been cast. The Emissary has spoken.”
“Your Emissary is a con man,” retorted Nick, spitting out blood with the words. He rolled onto his side and kicked his top leg, sweeping the Hashashin’s feet out from underneath him, bringing him crashing down onto the Foundation Stone. Then he scrambled on top and landed a counterblow to the man’s face, bloodying the terrorist’s lip to match his own.
The Hashashin swung up with a right, but Nick caught his arm and swept it across his body, sprawling his knees back and pressing down with all his weight to pin both of the terrorist’s arms to his chest. Their bloodied faces were inches apart. Nick slowly raked his forearm across the man’s jugular. The Hashashin coughed. His eyes bulged and he started to turn purple.
Nick put even more weight on the forearm. “You’re not going to detonate any nukes today. Now, where’s your boss?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw a man in an Israeli police uniform approaching. He leveled a submachine gun at them both.
“Don’t!” Nick shouted, but the policeman pulled the trigger. Nick jerked up and shielded his face as the Israeli riddled his captive with bullets.
The light beneath the dome grew another shade darker. The Hashashin coughed and gurgled and then went silent, staring sightlessly up at the rich gold above.
Nick slowly stood, raising his hands. “Easy, buddy, I’m not your enemy.”
“How can you say that?” asked the policeman. Then he pulled the trigger again.
CHAPTER 76
The policeman fired a burst of three bullets. Two slammed into Nick’s vest and one caught him in the right clavicle just above it, sending him reeling backward. He tripped over the barrier surrounding the Foundation Stone and fell to the floor.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” muttered the policeman, walking around the stone. He kept the weapon leveled.
Tendrils of wicked pain radiated outward from the wound, lighting Nick’s neck and chest on fire. He could sense loose bone fragments floating around as he struggled to his feet. “The case,” he breathed, holding his hands up to keep from getting shot again. “It’s a nuclear bomb. Get a team in here to contain it. And tell the men outside to breach the Al-Aqsa mosque. I have a man in there.”
“I have a man in there too. Yours is dead,” said the policeman. The man’s accent was hard to peg, New England maybe, with a trace of Gulf Arab. He backed up to the first ring of marble columns, keeping his weapon trained on Nick while he knelt down and picked up the remote trigger. “That is your problem, Nick Baron. You are completely unwilling to sacrifice your pieces.” The man nodded at the corpse still bleeding out on the sacred rock. “Me? I don’t suffer that deficiency. I treat my pieces the way they were meant to be treated — disposable.”
“Your pieces?” Nick muttered. He tried to focus through the pain, squinting at the face in the shadow of the ball cap. In the dim light of the mosque he had not recognized his primary target. “Kattan.”
The young man took off his police cap and tossed it aside. “Good. Very good. You remember. That means you remember taking my father from me.” Kattan abruptly stepped to one of the marble partitions and dragged Kurt Baron into view, bound and gagged. “And now I will take yours.”
Nick lurched forward, but Kattan shot a burst at the carpet in front of him, sending ricochets into the sacred stone and forcing him back. His father tried to shout through his gag, but the effort only resulted in a fit of coughing.
The terrorist approached, motioning Nick aside with the weapon, and the two circled each other until Kattan reached the Foundation Stone. He pulled his bound captive up onto the rock and stood over the nuke and the dead Hashashin.