Shadow Tag

2

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.