Shadow Tag by Steve Berry, Raymond Khoury Page B

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