Free Shadow Maker by James R. Hannibal Page B

Nick led his young teammate into the alley, the girls broke from their conversation to cast flirtatious taunts in their direction, alternating between stunted English and only slightly better German. A muted, pulsating beat emanated from the stairwell—club music stripped of everything but the bass by the heavy black door.
    The bouncer pushed off from his post against the brick wall and barred their path, his hands gripping the lapels of his black leather jacket. His eyes shifted from Nick’s blue irises up to his blond hair and back. “This is Hungarian bar. We don’t take dollars or euros here.”
    â€œKak naschet rubley?”
asked Nick in cool Russian, roughly pressing a thousand-ruble bill against the brute’s chest.
    The bouncer smiled. He took the bill, the Russian equivalent of a U.S. fifty, and stepped aside.
“Naslazhdaytes’, ser.”
    A blast of heat greeted Nick as he opened the door, and a cacophony of digital tones joined the thumping bass. Dim red light glowed through a haze of cigarette smoke. He and Quinn cut through the sparse crowd of dancers, making for one of the shiny black couches that lined the walls. A few of the patrons looked their way, but no one challenged them. They had already passed the gatekeeper at the top of the stairs. That was enough.
    â€œHow did you know to bring rubles?” asked Quinn once they had settled onto a secluded stretch of overstuffed vinyl.
    â€œIn this country, rubles almost always grease palms better than dollars,” said Nick, slipping his hand into the inside pocket of his coat, but he immediately removed it again as a fair-skinned girl with raven hair approached the table. She was young, far too young to be dressed as she was, in a thigh-length minidress that might have been cut from the same cheap vinyl as the couch.
    The girl bent down with a tray of drinks and said something in a sultry voice that did not fit her young features. Her eyes flitted over to Quinn.
    Nick didn’t pick up all the Hungarian, but he could gather the gist of what she said. The thought made him ill. He selected a pair of dark beers from the tray and replaced them with a wad of rubles, letting his hard expression tell the girl that he and his young friend were there for drinks and nothing more. She didn’t press him, almost looked grateful. She straightened and turned back toward the bar, wobbling on her stiletto heels as she did.
    Nick watched her go for a moment. He knew what she was, and he could easily reconstruct how she got there. He wanted to drag her back to the airport and put her on the team’s Gulfstream, send her home to DC where she could be a barista instead of a barmaid, but his team wasn’t here for her.
    Quinn also watched the girl walk away, likely with different thoughts. “Snap out of it, junior,” said Nick. “Let’s find our boy and bag him.”
    He reached into his coat again and withdrew his phone, a slim unit a little larger than an iPhone. The device consolidated both his civilian and company needs into one unit, with a firewall that separated the more interesting functions from the mundane. Walker had placed only two restrictions on apps for the personal side. No Facebook. No Twitter. No big loss.
    Nick had Angry Birds, though. Everyone had Angry Birds.
    The program he used now came from Scott rather than the App Store and resided on the classified side of the firewall. The engineer had pulled the screen saver from Grendel’s laptop, trimmed it to just the face, and transferred it to Nick’s phone. The app identified the subject’s key features: skin tone, hairline, bone structure. Then an algorithm built a three-dimensional predictive model.
    Nick held the phone flat between them so that Quinn could see, showing him the screen as if showing pictures to his friend, working it with his thumb. He wore a ring on his left hand—titanium, bulky. There were three square black