The Seventh Pillar Read online

  "How come no one has stopped them?"

  "You can't find them. They hide out in the southern mountains of Algeria. The whole region is within something called the Arc of Instability, across all of North Africa from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea."

  "Then maybe we shouldn't go there."

  "We probably won't need to."

  "Ready for the library?"

  "As I'll ever be. How long will this take, you think?"

  "It's research, Nick. There are around twenty thousand manuscripts. It could take days."

  "We don't have days. Rice needs results."

  "You can't hurry a search like this. I'm just saying it can take time. But I might get lucky. I'm told the manuscripts are well organized. The collection dates from the thirteenth century, right where we need to look."

  They found a taxi in front of the hotel and headed for the Institute. A hot, dry wind carried the timeless scent of the Sahara. The great desert stretched away for thousands of miles to the east.

  The cab drove past blocks of low houses and shops made from yellowish mud brick. The buildings had heavy wooden doors studded with metal decorations and decorative grillwork over the windows. The driver told them most of the houses were built around hidden courtyards and gardens.

  The streets were unpaved sand. Sand was everywhere. They passed donkeys, cows, goats. An occasional mangy dog or cat. They passed bee hive shaped clay ovens that hadn't changed design in hundreds of years, where groups of women in bright colored head wrappings and long skirts baked bread and chattered to each other.

  They pulled up in front of the library, on the edge of the desert. The building was new and modern, built to replace an older structure in another part of the city. They entered through a series of high barriers designed to minimize the blowing sand and found themselves in a large paved courtyard. Thick concrete and mud walls blocked the heat. A fountain trickled water into rectangular channels and small pools that cooled the air.

  Inside, Selena introduced herself to the librarian. Carter followed her down a ramp to the lower level. The restricted reading area was glassed off and air conditioned. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  Selena told the research assistant what she wanted. Carter took a seat. The assistant returned with a stack of manuscripts in colored binders. Selena settled in and began reading. It looked like a long day.

  Carter looked around the room. Several people bent over articles and manuscripts. A man with a dark, pockmarked face studied a manuscript at a table across the room. Nick's ear tingled. Something about him didn't seem right, but Carter couldn't pin it down. As if reading his mind, the man looked up at him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Five looked up from the papers in front of him. He smiled at the man who'd come in with the woman. The man turned away, scanning the room. Five watched the woman take a manuscript from a red binder and begin reading. He could tell it was the one he'd been told to watch for. It was as they had suspected might happen. Someone else sought the journal.

  The tip of her tongue showed between her lips as she made notes. He looked at her brazen clothing. Her legs were visible below her knees, her arms exposed. She wore a thin scarf over her hair to make her seem acceptable. She was an affront to all that was righteous.

  Whore.

  His instructions had been clear. Watch. If someone showed interest in the text, eliminate them. He had been waiting patiently for a week, pretending to study a fifteenth century mathematical discourse.

  Five did not find it difficult to be patient. Five was never impatient. Patience was wired into his genes. His roots went back to the days when his ancestors served the Teacher at Alamut, as he served the Teacher today. The Brotherhood still guarded the pure flame of Shia Islam. They were the true followers, the uncorrupted, a tradition passed down though the centuries.

  Hours passed. He watched the woman put away her pen and close her notebook. The time for the evening prayer approached. The librarians wanted people to leave.

  Five could tell she wasn't finished. It meant she'd be back. He had time to assess, to stalk. Time to kill. Her companion would pose no problem.

  He smiled to himself. A whore was a whore, after all. Good for something, before she died.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Stephanie fretted about the truck from Sudan. Earlier she'd tracked it with a DIA satellite that could read a license plate from twenty miles up. From Khartoum it had gone through Chad and Niger, then entered Mali. The tracker kept cutting in and out.

  Nick and Selena had been in Mali for two days. She called Nick to brief him.

  "We've got new info from the photos Lamont took. One of the men is Jibril al-Bausari. He’s Egyptian, a key figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and high in the terrorist network. It means something big is being planned."

  "Is he the one who blew up that Israeli embassy in South America?"

  "No. But he’s behind several assassinations, the murder of forty-two aid workers in Afghanistan and a plot that almost succeeded in destroying the Eiffel Tower."

  "I never heard about that."

  "We don’t want to discourage travel and tourism, do we?" She paused. "Bausari in charge means whatever's in that truck is important."

  "Where is it now?"

  "Near you, in Mali, heading north."

  "You think it's going to Algeria?"

  "Looks like it."

  "Let's hand it off to Langley."

  "I already talked with Lodge. He doesn't think it's worth the trouble."

  "Why am I not surprised," Nick said. "Like trying to kill our guys because they saw something being loaded isn't a clue." He thought for a moment. "How about we just take it out with a Predator or a Reaper?"

  "You know better, Nick. Without confirmation it's VX the Pentagon's not going to task a multi-million dollar asset."

  "You're right. I always hope, though." He paused. "Selena thinks she's on to something about that cult. Once we've got that, we could go after the truck."

  "That's what I was thinking. The roads are bad. They're not breaking any speed records."

  "I'll think it over and come up with something."

  For a moment Stephanie felt a flash of resentment. Nick was responsible for field ops. Still, she wasn't his assistant.

  "You do that," she said. She ended the call.

  Steph had often been in charge when she was Elizabeth Harker's deputy. She could do it, but she didn't have Elizabeth's fine sense of touch. Steph got along with Nick, she always had. But since Nick had taken on his new role he'd been uptight and short fused. It felt like she was walking a thin line with him. She didn't like it.

  Elizabeth might recover and return to her old job. Steph wouldn't mind, and she didn't think Nick would either. They'd only taken this on because the President had asked them to do it. It wasn't easy, this two director thing. Neither one of them had Harker's genius, her uncanny understanding. Between the two of them, they just about covered it. So far they hadn't made any major blunders. But they hadn't been at it for very long.

  It was a good team. Elizabeth had made it a great one.

  Steph knew Nick's nightmares and headaches had come back. He hadn't mentioned it but Selena had let it slip. Girl talk, really, to relieve the tense energy of the work. Steph liked Selena. She wasn't pretentious. She did her job and worked hard at improving the skills she needed.

  She'd turned out to have what it took. Steph didn't know if she would have done as well in Selena's shoes. It was one thing to blast holes in targets down in the basement range. Steph was good at that. It was another to blast holes in people who were trying to do the same to you.

  She thought about Nick. He had family problems on top of everything else. His mom had Alzheimer's. He'd been out in California a few weeks before and ended up in a fight with his sister about it. Nick didn't talk about his family, but Steph knew he'd grown up with an alcoholic bully for a father. It had made him hard and defended.

  Maybe that wasn't such a bad thing
. She was pretty good at it herself. In the Project, the only people you trusted were your own. In the Project, you spent a lot of time pretending life was normal. Like it was normal to be on the other side of the world looking for a group of assassins. Like it was normal to have no life beyond your work.

  At least Nick and Selena had each other. Steph had no one. She wondered if she ever would. She wondered if she'd ever meet someone she could trust. She'd just turned thirty-six. If she was going to have another intimate relationship with someone, it would have to be soon.

  She wasn't sure she wanted one. Not after the disaster of her marriage. That was in the days before Elizabeth recruited her and pulled her away from NSA.

  Here she was, co-director at an unbelievably young age of a powerful secret agency that had the President's ear and his whole-hearted support. There were a lot of people in Washington who would do anything to have her job.

  She wondered why it felt like something was missing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Five watched the two foreigners leave the Institute. She'd found it, he was certain. The look of satisfaction on her face at the end of the day gave her away. He needed to act.

  They got in a cab. Five was in no hurry. He knew they would go back to their hotel. They would eat somewhere, at the hotel or in town. Five thought they might go into town, since he'd watched them go into the hotel restaurant the night before. It made no difference. If they went into town after dark, his job would be easier. If they chose the hotel, he would wait until they were in their rooms. Either way, only a moderate challenge.

  As it turned out, they decided on town. Five followed them from the hotel to a place patronized by foreigners and noted for it's spicy menu of local dishes. He watched from a doorway part way down the block. He felt the weight of the dagger under his robe. A comforting friend.

  It was full dark when they emerged. There were no cabs. They began the walk back to the hotel.

  The streets were deserted. A bright moon cast shadows across the pale sand. Doors and windows formed black rectangles in the mud walls of the buildings. The soft fragrance of water and flowers from a hidden garden drifted on the night air.

  Five came up behind, silent as the sand. He focused on the man's neck, where the skull sat on top of the spine. He drew the dagger.

  Then something happened that had never happened before. The dagger caught on his robe and made a small sound, a tiny sound, a soft rustle on the night wind.

  Carter turned without thinking and brought his left arm up, knocking the thrust away. The dagger gleamed in the moonlight. Carter tried a hand strike. Five blocked and lashed out with a kick for the groin. Nick turned just enough so that it landed on his hip. The power of the blow threw him back against a wall. His left leg collapsed. He fell on his knees to the ground.

  Five moved in for the kill but he made another mistake. He ignored the woman.

  Selena landed a kick to his kidneys. Five arched backward in pain. He spun, shocked to find himself fighting a woman. Selena and Five moved back and forth in a violent martial dance, striking and parrying. The blade flashed in the moonlight. A fight to the death.

  Carter struggled to his feet. Somewhere in his mind he could hear AKs firing, smell the hot dust of an Afghan street. He shook it off.

  It looked like Selena was in trouble. He'd never seen martial arts like this. This was out of his league, but he had to try. Before he could intervene, Selena landed a kick to the chest. Five staggered back and dropped the dagger. She kicked out again, landed a blow on the thigh, then spun in a high kick that struck the neck. Nick heard the bones snap.

  It was over.

  Selena went down on one knee, drawing in deep breaths. Nick knelt beside her.

  "Are you hurt? Are you all right?"

  "I'm okay." She took another breath. "Winded. Need to work out more."

  "Work out more? Jesus, Selena."

  "I think I might have a cracked rib," she said.

  "That was something. I thought he had you."

  "Twenty years of practice and it was barely enough. Next time I see Master Kim I'll have to thank him."

  Carter looked down at the dead man, sprawled in the sand.

  "He's got a tattoo on his arm. It's Arabic."

  Selena stood up, holding her side. She winced. She bent over the figure to look at the inked marking. The ink was old, the blue faded. The tattoo had been there for a while.

  خمسة

  "It says, 'Five'."

  "That's all? Five?"

  "Maybe it's a tribal tattoo of some sort."

  Nick searched the body. On the other arm was another tattoo, the Shia ambigram.

  "He's one of the assassins."

  "Why come after us?"

  Nick looked down at the pockmarked face. "I saw him in the library. He must have seen you reading that manuscript and we became targets."

  "But someone could wait there forever and no one would ever see those papers."

  "I guess that didn't matter. It could be recent, since they started killing people."

  "Then what I found must be important."

  "Yeah."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Nick called Stephanie. "He had a tattoo of the ambigram."

  "Anything else about him?"

  "A tattoo that says 'Five' in Arabic. From his looks he could be from anywhere in the Middle east. No ID. No other marks. He had an antique dagger. I'm looking at it now. It's a nasty piece of work, looks like a stiletto, just a long, narrow V with a blood groove down the middle and a straight hilt. The ambigram is worked into the guard. It's sharp enough that I could shave with it. Nothing else."

  "Why you and Selena? He couldn't have known you were coming."

  "I think he was waiting in the library to spot anyone trying to find out more about this secret order. Not waiting for us in particular."

  "What did Selena find?"

  "I'll let her tell you." Carter handed the phone to Selena. Bruises darkened her arms and legs. She had to be careful taking a deep breath. It could have been worse. She could be dead. He could be dead, a dagger buried in his neck.

  "Steph. I found something that indicates the cult may have survived."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "A manuscript from the fifteenth century, written by a Sunni about the corruption of Shia beliefs. It mentions a splinter group from the Hashishin who went underground. The author vilifies them. He repeats rumors of a hidden sanctuary or school in what is now Pakistan. He relates conversations with travelers of the period and gives a few landmarks."

  "A school for assassins?"

  "The narrator says they thought were the only true guardians of Islam. All of Islam, not just the Shia branch. They were loathed by the other Shi'ites. They were dedicated to restoration of the true belief, as they saw it."

  "How were they supposed to do that?"

  "When the time is right, Allah is supposed to lead them to victory against all of Islam's enemies, within and without. Holy war. Jihad."

  "I suppose there's some idea about when the time will be right?"

  "Not specific. Only that there will be a sign of some kind."

  "What, like Revelations? The moon turning red? That kind of thing?"

  Selena shifted the phone to her other ear. "It doesn't say."

  "Let me talk to Nick again."

  Selena handed the phone back to Nick.

  "Nick, the bug quit on the truck."

  He waited.

  "The last time it worked they were north of you on the border between Mali and Algeria, not far from a place called Taoudenni."

  "When was that?"

  "This morning. It might still be there, but I can't find it on satellite. That terrain is very rugged. There are a lot of places to hide and they could head north or west. They're only moving at night."

  Carter thought for a moment. "We can't let that truck get away. I think Selena and I have to go after it. Maybe a little recon is in order."

  "You
can't just drive up there. Not without an armed convoy."

  "I'm thinking air. Rent a plane and pilot here. We spot the truck, we can track it again. We don't find it, we come back and think out our next move. We find it, we come back and figure how to take it out."

  "I don't know, Nick..."

  "You have a better idea?"

  He heard her sigh. "No. I don't. You're on the scene. It's your call."

  Right, he thought. "How are Ronnie and Lamont?"

  "Lamont took a round right through the bone and he lost a lot of blood. His upper arm is smashed to bits. He's lucky to be alive. He almost lost the arm. They patched it back together with plates. Ronnie's got a bad hand where he cut himself. Might make it stiff when he heals up."

  "Tell them I said some people will do anything to get off work."

  Stephanie laughed.

  Carter ended the call.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nick asked around at the airport and tracked down an American pilot named Harmon. Harmon set up a meet in a bar. According to him, the only bar in town that served cold beer. Mali practiced a tolerant Islam, the kind the fanatics wanted to consign to the flames. There weren’t many bars in this Muslim nation, but there were a few.

  The place felt like a time warp from the 30s. It was half full with a mix of foreigners and locals. The bartender wore a white jacket that had seen better days. The back bar featured spotted mirrors, a dozen bottles and arched wooden grillwork. Wooden ceiling fans pretended to stir the stifling air. Scarred tables were scattered about the room. An old upright piano stood next to a small stage. A fat white man in a white suit and a panama hat sat draped over a stool at the bar.