Shadow Tag
Raymond Khoury
CONTENTS
SHADOW TAG
An original short story by Raymond Khoury and Steve Berry
Sneak preview of THE END GAME
Sneak preview of The 14th COLONY
ALSO BY RAYMOND KHOURY
The Last Templar
The Sanctuary
The Sign
The Templar Salvation
The Devil’s Elixir
Rasputin’s Shadow
Click here to Raymond’s Amazon Page
ALSO BY STEVE BERRY
The Amber Room
The Romanov Prophecy
The Third Secret
The Templar Legacy
The Alexandria Link
The Venetian Betrayal
The Charlemagne Pursuit
The Paris Vendetta
The Emperor’s Tomb
The Jefferson Key
The Columbus Affair
The King’s Deception
The Lincoln Myth
The Patriot Threat
Click here to Steve’s Amazon Page
SHADOW TAG
Raymond Khoury and Steve Berry
© 2016 by Raymond Khoury and Steve Berry
Cover design by Jem Butcher
eBook formatting by Jo Harrison
My thanks to both, give them a shout for your publishing needs.
1
London, England
“And to close, gentlemen … the question many of your fans have asked over the years. Are we ever going to see Sean Reilly and Cotton Malone together in a book?”
It was a late September Saturday, and the two authors were seated side by side on a small podium in a quiet corner of the Olympia Conference Centre, the exhibition hall that was hosting the first London ThrillerFest. At a slight angle to them was their host for the Q&A session, a veteran British journalist who also wrote thrillers, albeit using a pseudonym. It had been a pleasant end to an enjoyable day. The interviewer, by virtue of being an insider, had asked questions that were engaging and challenging. The journalists and a few dozen fans in the audience, many of them clutching copies of both authors’ novels, had evidently also enjoyed the session.
The attendance had been gratifying, given the heavy rain that had been drowning the city all week. Summers in London were schizophrenic, the weather often fluctuating wildly from day to day, sometimes going so far as to dip into all four seasons within the same day, if not the same hour. September was usually a more settled, calmer month—usually. Not this year, though. This year, September clearly forgot to take its meds.
“Here’s the thing,” Steve Berry said. “Raymond and I, we’re all for it. But we can’t get Reilly and Malone to agree on the story.”
“They can be real jerks sometimes,” Khoury added.
The audience chuckled.
“And why is that?” the interviewer asked, playing along.
“You know how these guys are,” Berry said. “They’ve got massive egos. Each of them wants to be the genius that figures out how to decipher ‘the big clue’”—said with air quotes—“take out the bad guy and save the day.”
“Whenever we bring it up,” Khoury added, “they’re like, ‘why does he get to do all the cool stuff,’ or ‘I should be the one doing that.’ Petty, right?”
“Then there’s the whole issue of the cover.”
“Whose face is on the left, whose name comes first in the blurb on the back cover. Downright embarrassing.”
“And yet, they seem so noble and mature on the page,” the interviewer said.
“That’s just the way we weave our magic,” Berry said, deadpan.
More chuckles.
“It takes prodigious talent, to be sure,” Khoury threw in. “Years of carefully honing our craft.”
“Frankly, gentlemen, I’m surprised,” the interviewer noted. “I mean, surely you can get them to behave.”
“You’d think, right? I don’t know where they get it from,” Khoury quipped, turning to Berry. “Do you?”
“No clue,” Berry said with a smirk. “Might have to write some therapy sessions into the next book.”
“So I take it we won’t be seeing them together anytime soon?” the interviewer asked.
Berry looked at Khoury, paused—then they both turned to their host and smiled.
“You’ll need to ask them,” Berry said.
The audience chuckled again, and with that, the host ended the session by thanking his guests and the audience.
After some brief chit-chat with a few fans who had approached them with books to sign and further questions to answer, the writers made their way through the vast, crowded hall.
“So, tell me something,” Berry asked Khoury as they ambled towards the exit. “Ten years later … anything you’d have done differently with your book?”
It had been ten years since the two authors’ Templar books had first come out, hitting the shelves within a few weeks of each other: Berry’s had been The Templar Legacy, and Khoury’s, The Last Templar. Both had been huge bestsellers. The synchronicity of the two works was entirely unexpected; each author had written his own book without knowing anything about what the other was working on. The end results, while dealing with the same theme, were very different, and instead of competing with each other, the books ended up fuelling the other’s success. They also seeded what became a close friendship between the two authors.
“Ten years,” Khoury mulled. “Damn. Where’d they go?”
“Sitting at our keyboards, mostly.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Typing away our fantasies instead of living them. You ever think about that?”
“What, me working for the Justice Department? Can you imagine?” Berry chuckled.
“Maybe if they have a department that investigates restaurants with overpriced wine lists.”
“That I could do. But seriously … looking back at it now, ten years later. You wouldn’t change anything in it?”
Khoury chortled. “Tons.”
“Really?”
Khoury reflected on Berry’s question for a second, then said, “Well … the ending, maybe. Tess tossing that page from the diary into the sea. I’m still in two minds about it.”
“Yeah, I agree. It sucked.” Berry said, deadpan.
Khoury turned to him, mock-surprised.
Then they both laughed.
“Just for that, you’re buying—and I’m choosing the restaurant,” Khoury said.
“Done.”
They stepped across the large foyer and out into the early evening downpour, popping open their Festival umbrellas.
“We’re going to have a hard time getting a cab in this rain,” Khoury said, pulling out his phone. “Let me see if there’s an Uber around.”
“Hang on,” Berry said, pointing ahead. “That’s us.”
Khoury looked up. A black Ford Galaxy people carrier, the kind commonly used as minicabs in London, was parked by the curb, waiting. A man in a black suit was standing beside it. He was holding an open umbrella in one hand and a white card in the other. The card said, “Berry/Khoury.”
The driver, a tall, stubble-bearded man in a loose-fitting black suit but no tie, beckoned them over with a welcoming nod, as if he’d recognized them.
Khoury looked quizzically at Berry. “You order that?”
Berry shook his head. “No, but, whoever did we can thank later. Let’s get in.”
They walked up to the mini-cab.
“Mr Berry, Mr Khoury?” the driver asked courteously, and before waiting for an answer, he swung the rear door open and motioned them in. “Please.”
Berry glanced at Khoury, shrugged, and stepped up to the car, closing his umbrella before climbing in.
Khoury followed suit.
And just as the driver shut the rear door, the opposite one opened and a man hustled into the car, shoving Berry into the middle of the rear bench as he closed the door behind him.
“Hey, buddy, it’s taken—”
Berry didn’t finish his sentence. The sight of an automatic handgun in the intruder’s hand, leveled at his gut, stilled him.
Khoury interjected, “Whoa, what the—?”
The man swung the gun so it was now facing him. “Shut up.” Then he glanced over to the driver, who was now in his seat.
“Yalla, imshi,” he said.
The driver nodded, put the car into gear, and drove away.
Berry looked at Khoury, visibly worried.
The meal would have to wait.
2
New York City
Sean Reilly was in a lousy mood.
The day hadn’t started badly. Quite the contrary, in fact. Saturdays were easily in his top-two favorite days of the week. Waking up to hints of sunlight that infiltrated his and Tess’s bedroom through cracks in the blinds—much better than the ramblings of an overly-caffeinated DJ on the clock radio. Cuddling in bed instead of scrambling to get to work. Enjoying the morning paper in actual, old-fashioned print and not on an iPad, and good coffee in an actual china mug with steam rising out of it into the open air. Savoring waffles and maple syrup instead of gulping down a cold bagel while rushing into town.
Yes indeed, the signs had been good. Even the weather—sunny with a little edge to it, a lovely New England late summer day—was cooperating. A nice, relaxing weekend split between quality time with the kids, and Netflix and chill with Tess, was on the cards. Until the phone call.
The ominous phone call summoning him to 26 Federal Plaza.
A call to duty.
“London? Today?” Reilly asked, frowning.
Ron Gallo, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the FBI and Reilly’s far-from-beloved boss, leaned back and spread his arm wide, palms open. “According to the intel, that’s where the action is. There’s a flight leaving Newark in an hour. You’ll need to be on it.”
Reilly’s frown deepened.
The intel was thin, no doubt. It had originated in the UK the night before, courtesy of GCHQ’s massive eavesdropping and metadata surveillance programs. It involved a bunch of unknown hostiles planning something that involved “the books,” making a move on some unspecified “American specialists” that weekend, and targeting none other than the great Satan, of course—terrorist-speak for the US.
Par for the course in terms of the kinds of intel the FBI and various intelligence agencies look into on a daily basis, intel which mostly turns out to be bogus. In this case, however, one of the voices belonged to a person of interest who MI5, Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, had heard before, but had so far failed to identify, all of which meant that the chatter was taken seriously. The Feds would have probably left it to the spooks at MI5 to deal with on their own while keeping the Bureau in the loop, except that one of the goons happened to mention the dreaded T word.
The one that meant Reilly would be dragged into this.
Templar.
Reilly nodded, to himself, doing a mental fast-forward through what the weekend was probably going to look like.
“I guess I’m off to London then,” he grumbled.
“Hey, don’t look so disappointed. I’ve always wanted to visit, and you get to do it on the Bureau’s dime.”
“Terrific,” Reilly said with a slow, ponderous nod. He wasn’t really thinking about Big Ben or the London Eye. He was more worried about how he was going to keep Tess from wanting to stick her nose into this and tag along. If she heard something involving the Templars was going down, she’d insist on being part of it. She’d been dragged into these nasty affairs twice before, and the last thing Reilly wanted was for her to get in harm’s away again.
No, he’d make sure Tess wouldn’t get involved. But he had an idea of someone else who should—assuming he’d want to. Someone who knew the world of books, rare ones in particular, better than anyone he knew, and who also possessed the necessary lethal skill set that might be needed if things turned ugly.
A quick call to Copenhagen was on the cards.
3
The room was, all things considered, better than expected. A large, windowless space, bare and unfurnished except for a couple of bare mattresses on the floor. Plain concrete block walls, painted white. Neon ceiling lights that buzzed slightly. Not cold, but not warm either. A bit damp, and that was pretty much it. Not exactly a suite at the Ritz, but at least it didn’t have blood or anything vile staining the mattresses or walls.
Berry and Khoury had no idea where they were. They’d had their phones taken away as soon as the Galaxy had driven off, then they’d had black hoods pulled over their heads. The ride had been uneventful. Not less than half an hour, not more than an hour, most of it in traffic. Nothing spoken that they could build on. Just a silent unease coursing through the two of them, coupled with total bafflement about what the hell was going on.
Once at their destination, they’d been hustled out of the car, marched inside some kind of structure, ushered down some stairs, and locked in that room.
“It’s got to be some kind of joke, right? We’re being punked,” Berry said.
“I don’t know, Steve. This feels very real to me.”
“That’s the whole point, isn’t it? No point punking someone if you’re not going to do it right.”
He was pacing around the room, deep in thought, while Khoury was sitting on the mattress, his back to the wall.
“I bet you it’s Lee Child,” he added. “Lee or Jim Rollins. They’re behind this, I know it. We talked about what we could do to make the first UK ThrillerFest something special. I bet you this is it.” His eyes squinted as they scoured the upper edges of the walls. “They must have hidden cameras all over this place.”
Thrillerfest was the premier event for thriller novelists. Hundreds of writers from all over the world had come to participate in panels, interviews, and discussions. And a bit of mischief among the attendees was not uncommon.
“You think that’s it?” Khoury asked.
“I’m telling you. It’s right out of Lee’s playbook. The man’s sick. Every one of the Reacher books is testimony to that. Between him and Jim, it’s just the kind of thing they’d come up with.”
“Okay, if that’s the case,” Khoury said, “I hope they’ve got some decent catering set up, cause I didn’t have lunch.”
Just then, the lock rattled as a key worked its tumblers, then the door creaked open.
Two men walked in.
They were the two men who’d brought them there: the driver, and the guy with the gun. The driver was still in his suit, the gunman still in the same shabby jeans and cheap leather jacket. They both had olive skin, black, greasy hair and hadn’t shaved for a while. More of note was that they both had automatics tucked under their belts.
Berry winked at Khoury.
“Here we go,” he said, smiling. “Showtime.”
Khoury mimicked a fearful shiver and smiled back.
Then a third man walked in. He had the same broad ethnic mix, but looked a bit older than the first two, somewhere in his forties. He also had more presence than the others. He also looked more serious in his grey suit, charcoal semi-shiny shirt, black laced shoes and no tie. He wasn’t smiling. Not that the other two were, but his expression was loaded with portent.
The driver shut the door behind him as the new goon stepped further into the room, then stopped.
Berry took the lead and stepped towards him, playing the part. “Okay, I assume I’m supposed to say something like, I don’t know who the hell you are or what you think you’re doing, but if you don’t want to get fast-tracked to Guantanamo, I suggest you let us go right now and we all forget this ever happened.”
The man just stood there, studying Berry. Then he panned ac
ross to take Khoury in, scrutinizing him in silence before turning back to Berry.
“Alternatively,” Khoury added, “we don’t mind sticking around a bit longer, but we’d both love it if you could get Deliveroo to bike us over some food. Maybe some burgers and fries from GBK? Blue cheese for me, medium.” He turned to Berry. “You want a shake with yours? They do a killer Oreo one.”
The man didn’t react. He just kept staring at them in silence. If his face had any expression on it, it was merely a hint of disdain.
Finally, he spoke.
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough,” he said.
Khoury couldn’t quite place his accent, but the man had definitely spent a long time in the UK.
Without taking his eyes off them, the man reached behind his back and pulled out a handgun. With one fluid move, he chambered a round, then he aimed the gun straight at Berry’s head. He held the gun there for a few seconds, then his arm swiveled across to line up on Khoury’s face.
The two writers didn’t move.
Then the gunman flicked his gun slightly away and pulled the trigger—once, twice, three times.
The walls shook with the echoes of the detonations as the mattress Khoury was sitting on exploded, bits of springs, foam and cotton flying into the air.
Khoury was on his feet in a flash, staring at Berry, who was equally shaken. The gunman lowered his gun, studied the two men, then nodded.
“Now that you know I’m serious … how about we get down to business?”
4
Reilly gave Cotton Malone an acknowledging nod as he spotted the agent-turned-bookseller emerge from the customs area at London’s Heathrow airport.
He hadn’t waited long. Reilly’s flight from JFK had landed just half an hour before Malone’s short hop from Copenhagen, where he’d lived since handing in his creds and leaving the Justice Department over a decade ago. It was just enough time for a cup of coffee, a croissant and a quick trawl through e-mails and intel updates before they were reunited and driven into London in a car the embassy had sent for them.
