Assassin's Code

Chapter One

She said, “Look down at your chest.”

I held the cell phone to my ear as I bent my head. Two red dots, quivering slightly, danced right over my heart.

“You are one second away from death,” said the caller.

Chapter Two

I didn’t know the voice. She was a stranger. I didn’t know her name. Didn’t know anything except that she had my cell number. Ten seconds ago I was about to go into Starbox-yes, they really call it that in Iran-for a cup of bold and a couple of pastries. The street outside was empty.

I looked up. The shooters had to be in the building across the street, maybe the fifth floor. Didn’t really matter, the range was a hundred yards and even a sloppy marksman could punch my ticket at that distance. I doubted these guys were sloppy. And there were two of them. I was also pretty sure I knew why they were after me.

“Okay,” I said.

“I need you to confirm your name,” she said in Persian. She had a very sexy voice for a psycho killer. Low and smoky.

“Why?”

“Because I have to be certain.”

“Geez, sister,” I said, “if this is how you ID your targets then I don’t think you’re going to get that contract killer merit badge.”

The joke didn’t translate well but she made a sound. It might have been a laugh. Glad she was amused. Sweat was pouring down my spine. The two little laser sights gave me no chance at all to run.

“If this was simply a matter of killing you,” she said, “then we’d have done it and taken your wallet for identification.” She had a European accent but she was hiding it by trying to speak Persian like a native. Kind of weird. Not the weirdest thing going on at the moment.

“Um… thanks?” I said.

“Tell me your name,” she said again.

There had to be three of them. Two shooters and her. Was she the spotter? If not, there could have been one or two others, spotting for the gunmen. Or it might have been the three of them.

“Ebenezer Scrooge,” I said.

“No games,” she warned. “Your name.”

“Joe.”

“Full name.”

“Joseph.”

One of the laser sights drifted down from my chest and settled on my crotch.

“Once more?” she coaxed.

“Joseph Edwin Ledger.” No screwing around this time.

“Rank?”

“Why?”

“Rank?”

“Captain. Want my shoe size?”

There was a pause. “I was warned about you. You think you’re funny.”

“Everyone thinks I’m funny.”

“I doubt that’s true. How often do you make Mr. Church laugh out loud?”

“Never heard of him,” I lied.

Now I was confused. Up till now I thought she was part of a team looking to take me down for the little bit of nastiness I got into last night. Echo Team and I went into a high-security facility and liberated three twentysomethings who had been arrested a year ago while hiking in the mountains. The Iraqi mountains. An Iranian patrol crossed the border, nabbed the hikers, and started making noise in the media that the three hikers had illegally trespassed and therefore they were spies. They weren’t. One was a former Peace Corps team leader who was there with his animal behaviorist girlfriend who wanted to take photos of a kind of rare tiger to help her with her master’s thesis. Acinonyx jubatus venaticus. Asiatic cheetah. Also known as the Iranian cheetah. No, I’m not making this up.

The hikers had been used as pawns in Iran’s ongoing policy of stalling and disinformation regarding their nuclear program. Normally we’d let the State Department and world opinion exert pressure on the Iranian government… but the third member of the hiking party was the only son of one of America’s most important senators. The real twist is that the senator was a key player on several committees crucial to the U.S. war effort. Everyone with a spoonful of brains knew that the Iranians staged the whole thing to be able to turn dials on Senator McHale.

And it was starting to work. So the president asked Church to make the problem go away. We were Church’s response.

“So, who gets to slap the cuffs on me?” I asked.

This time she did laugh.

“No, Captain Ledger,” she said, “here’s how it’s going to work. As soon as I am done speaking you will turn off your cell phone and remove the battery and the SIM card. Put the SIM card and phone into different pockets. Walk to the curb and drop the battery into the culvert. Then I want you to go into the cafe. Order a coffee, sit in the corner. Do not reassemble your phone. Do not use the store’s phone. Write no notes to the staff or other customers. Sit and enjoy your coffee. Read the newspaper. Ahmadinejad is insisting that the dramatics at the prison last night were the result of a boiler explosion. You should find that amusing. Do not make any calls. Maybe have a second cup of coffee.”

“Do you work for Starbox? If so, I can’t say I dig your new marketing strategy.”

She ignored me. Her resistance to my wit was almost as disconcerting as the laser sights on my junk. Almost.

She said, “In a few minutes a person will enter the cafe. A man. He will recognize you and will join you. The two of you will have a conversation and then he will leave. Once he has left, you will wait another ten minutes before you reassemble your phone. You are on your own to find a new battery. You are supposed to be resourceful, so I imagine you will solve that problem without my advice.”

“Then what do I do?”

“Then,” she said, “you will do whatever you judge best.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“When do I meet you?”

“You don’t.”

“I’d like to.”

“No,” she said with another little laugh, “you would not.”

“Tell me something, miss, why go to these lengths? This could have been arranged with a lot less drama.”

“No it could not. If you are smarter than you appear, then you’ll understand why in a few minutes.”

“These laser sights going to be on me the whole time? It’s a lousy fashion statement and people will talk.”

There was a moment’s silence on the other end and then both sights vanished. I had to control myself from collapsing against the wall. I was pretty sure it would be two or three weeks before my nuts felt safe enough to climb down out of my chest cavity. My heart was beating like a jazz drum solo-loud, fast, and with no discernable rhythm.

“The clock is now ticking, Captain Ledger. Once I disconnect, please follow the instructions you have been given.”

“Wait-” I said, but the line went dead.

I held the phone in my hand and looked across the street to the office building. Even without the sights I knew they could take me anytime they wanted.

There were no real options left. Just because the laser sights weren’t on me didn’t mean that I was safe. I think they’d used them for effect. It was broad daylight; they certainly had scopes. So I did as I was told. I dismantled my phone and put the SIM card in my left coat pocket and the empty phone casing in my jeans. With great reluctance I walked to the edge of the pavement and stared for a moment down into the black hole of the culvert.

“Crap,” I said, and dropped the battery, which vanished without a trace. All I heard was a dull plop as it landed in the subterranean muck.

Before I turned to go into the store I scratched the tip of my nose with my forefinger. I was sure they’d see that, too.

Chapter Three

I went into the Starbox and ordered my coffee.

The waitress, a slim gal with a blue headscarf, glanced at my hands, which were visibly shaking. “Decaf?” she asked.

I screwed a smile into place and tried to make a joke. It fell flat. I repeated my drink order in a low mumble, paid for it and a French edition of the Tehran Daily News, and took them with me to a table where I could watch the street. It was pretty early, so the place was empty. There were two leather chairs in a corner and I took one, aware that there was no place in the cafe where a shooter with a good scope couldn’t find me.

Last year I’d been in a coffee shop when a strike team tried to take me out. You’d think I’d have learned by now. My best friend and shrink, Dr. Rudy Sanchez, constantly tells me that I drink too much coffee. He says, “Caffeine will kill you,” all the time. He’ll be delighted to hear me admit that he was very nearly right.

I crossed my legs as if that would offer my groin any real protection from a high-velocity sniper bullet and tried to read the paper.

Apparently America is still the Great Satan. What a surprise.

The main headline was about last week’s assassination attempt on the nation’s Rahbare Mo’azzame Enghelab-the Supreme Leader. A man dressed as a Shia cleric had attended a prayer session at Mashhad, which is the second largest city in Iran and one of the holiest cities in the Shia Muslim world, over five hundred miles east of Tehran, near the borders of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. It’s the resting place of the Imam Reza, seventh descendant of the prophet Muhammad and the eighth of the Twelve Imams. I’ve been there. It’s a gorgeous city, and home to the most extensive collection of Iranian cultural and artistic treasures. Millions of Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mashhad every year, as do scholars and tourists like me; and that’s been going on since medieval times. The saying is “The rich go to Mecca but the poor journey to Mashhad.”

So, after a few introductory speeches, the Supreme Leader stepped up to lead the people in prayer and discuss matters of faith. Problem was, the fake cleric whipped off his coat to reveal a vest packed with Semtex. A group of young men grabbed the bomber and tried to drag him outside before the bombs went off. They only partly succeeded, and though the mosque was not destroyed, it was damaged. The Supreme Leader received minor injuries, but sixty-four people died, and the effect was like cutting a scar into the flesh of Islam.

I’m not a Muslim, and I’m not deeply religious even with my Methodist upbringing-not like my father and brother whose butts have worn grooves in the pews in our church back in Baltimore-but there is something that disgusts me on a deep level when someone makes a deliberate attack on the faith of another person, or in this case on an entire people. I don’t like it when it happens to Americans; and I certainly don’t like it when Americans do it to each other. Can’t say I’m much in favor of it anywhere in the world.

Who was to blame for this particular hate crime?

Hard to tell.

Lately there’s been a weirdly sharp rise in hate crimes throughout the Middle East. Five times as many suicide bombers, a 300 percent increase in political assassinations, plus car bombs, pipe bombs, and even a rash of people found murdered with their throats completely torn out.

At the best of times the Mideast was never known for its easygoing tolerance; lately it’s like everyone has gone just a little bit crazier. My boss, Mr. Church, has been monitoring the escalation of violence, and although he hasn’t come out and said so, I’m certain that he’s suspicious of the rising body count. My friend Bug, who runs the computer resources for the Department of Military Sciences, told me on the sly that Church wanted him to run a thorough background search on the victims, even the ones who appeared to be innocent bystanders.

“Why?” I asked.

“’Cause the boss thinks there’s a hidden agenda,” answered Bug.

“He always thinks there’s a hidden agenda,” I remarked.

“He’s usually right, though, isn’t he?”

And I had no argument for that. Like the bumper stickers say, “You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.”

I’d been following this in the local and national news, and I scanned the paper to see if they had anything on the mosque bomber, but this rag was pretty heavily slanted toward the ultraconservative view, which pretty much concludes that if a bird shits on a statue in Iran it’s a U.S. plot. The reporter, probably quoting a government directive, claimed that this was the latest act in a series of escalating terrorist attacks by America. Completely ignoring the fact that half of the recent victims in the Middle East were Americans or allies. Go figure.

The rest of the paper was local stuff. No cartoons. No Doonesbury or Zits or Tank McNamara. No crossword puzzle.

Time crawled by. A few people came in for coffee.

I debated rolling sideways out of the chair and shimmying behind the counter, but if I did that and the snipers opened up I’d be the cause of civilian casualties.

Besides… after all this I kind of wanted to see who was going to walk in the door.

While I waited, I went over everything that had happened last night. This thing with the woman and the snipers didn’t seem to fit, but… how could it not? We did a lot of harm last night… Somebody must want some payback.

I sipped my coffee. It wasn’t Starbucks, but it was hot and black.

I could almost hear the echo of gunfire in my ears…

Chapter Four

The trial was set to start in two days, so to avoid the crowds near the capital building that had been a constant since the mosque bombing, the military moved the three hikers to a secure location on the outskirts of Tehran. The move was also likely done to reduce the risk of having the press ask any questions of the hikers, and there was an army of reporters from all over the world in Iran right now.

This whole thing worked for us. It gave us a window we otherwise would never have had.

The new location was a small jail near a residential district; no one would think to look there. Except we were already looking there. Our computer, MindReader, was plugged into the Iranian military police network, courtesy of Abdul Jamar, an Iranian on the CIA payroll. Abdul’s older brother had been murdered by the secret police for writing essays in protest of the nuclear program. This was his form of payback.

When Mr. Church formed the Department of Military Sciences he built it around the MindReader computer system, which was his sole property. Bug, our head of computer operations, hinted that Church may have written some of its more advanced software packages, but Church refused to confirm it. Actually, Church simply ignored the question, which was his style. MindReader has a lot of functions, but two stand out and make it the most valuable tool in the intelligence arsenal. It is designed to look for patterns, and though computers can’t generalize, MindReader comes damn close. It gathers information from other sources, including many that refuse to share their intel with the DMS. That doesn’t matter to MindReader, and that’s the other reason it’s so valuable. It is designed to intrude into virtually any other computer system without tripping alarms, and when it backs out, it rewrites the target computer’s software so that there is no record that it had ever been hacked. The system is proprietary and no one outside of a select few DMS senior staff has access to it; and no one has full access except Church.

My team and I were staying in a seedy hotel near the center of town-one that allowed dogs-and my dog was currently waiting there for us. When we got word about the transfer, we began tracking the move through a series of high-security-coded e-mails. I had half of Echo Team with me for this: my number two, First Sergeant Bradley “Top” Sims; the big California kid, Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit; the professorial Khalid Shaheed; the laconic former LAPD sniper John Smith; and the newbie, Lydia Ruiz, who was in the navy’s first covert group of women SEALs.

Khalid was, among other things, a makeup artist who could have gotten work on Broadway. When we arrived at the hotel room, among the equipment delivered for us was a professional stage makeup kit. Khalid used it to transform us all into Iranians. Luckily a lot of people in Iran look like their European forebears. Khalid had to tone down his own darker Egyptian complexion. Bunny and I both got our fair hair dyed black. Lydia was Latina but had the olive skin of her Madrid ancestors; with the right eye makeup and a modest chador with a headscarf, she would blend right in. John Smith was already dark-haired, so Khalid gave his pale face a little more color.

Top was never going to look like either an Iranian or an Arab, but that was okay. There were plenty of African Muslims in Iran, and Top could speak Somali and Persian with an African lilt. Except for Top, we all dressed in military police uniforms.

We let the transfer happen and gave it about three hours for all the hubbub to settle down. Top, dressed like a factory worker, came into the police station to report that someone had stolen the tires off of his car while he was out to dinner with his wife. Lydia was the wife. Top was not hysterical but still managed to be loud enough to draw attention, and no matter what he said, Lydia contradicted and corrected him. The officers found it all very amusing, though they dutifully took the report.

The rest of us watched all this on tiny monitors built into the faces of our wristwatches. Very Dick Tracy. One of the last toys Mr. Church got from his longtime friend Steve Jobs. Stuff was three years away from hitting the commercial market. They’ll be going out as iSee, and Apple will make another gazillion off it. Pretty handy for the military, especially when married to the high-definition digital camera built into the middle button of Top’s shirt.

We were parked in two cars, one in front, one in back. The streets were empty. It was nearing the time for Isha’a, the evening prayer, last of the five prayer times of the day.

Eight men in the police station’s front room. Top made sure to show us as he turned to appeal to one officer after another in his distress about his tires. MindReader provided us with a floor plan. One door in front, one in back. Ten cells. Thermal scans from a satellite confirmed the eight men up front and four more in the back, plus three thermal signatures in the holding area. The hikers each separated into different cells.

Twelve to five, and if we blew the snatch or let them raise the alarm, we were going to fill those empty cells. Even though none of us carried any ID, and although our fingerprints and DNA were in no databases anywhere, thanks to MindReader, it wouldn’t be a stretch for anyone to guess where we came from. We were potentially bigger political currency than the three college kids, even if one of them was a senator’s only son.

“Okay, Top,” I murmured as we got out of our cars. “Party time.”

The easiest way to do this would have been to kick the doors, toss in a couple of flash-bangs and kill everyone in a uniform. That would also be barbaric. We weren’t at war with Iran, and we certainly weren’t at war with a small regional police station. The officers in there were nowhere near the policy level. They were probably working schlubs like me and my guys; like my brother back in Baltimore PD.

So we went with Plan B.

The flash-bangs? Yeah, okay, we did that. But, hey, everyone likes party favors.

When I gave the word, Top and Lydia jammed their palms against their ears, squeezed their eyes shut and dropped to the floor. Khalid came through the station’s front door and lobbed a flash-bang in a softball underarm pitch that arced it over the intake counter and landed it right on the duty officer’s desk. I was right behind Khalid and I had a second’s glimpse of the officer staring in unbelieving horror at the grenade.

Then… BANG!

The flash-bang is designed to temporarily blind and deafen anyone in the blast radius. It feels exactly like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer made of pure light. You don’t shrug it off. You scream, you go temporarily but intensely deaf and blind, and roll around on the floor. If you’re up close and personal it can burst your eardrums.

Everyone in the room was staggered.

I raised a Benelli M4 shotgun and opened up. I wasn’t firing buckshot-my gun was loaded with beanbag rounds. That sounds fun. It isn’t. The rounds are small fabric pillows loaded with #9 lead shot. They won’t penetrate the skin, but it feels like you’ve been punched by the Incredible Hulk. You do go down and you do it right now.

There was one officer who hadn’t gotten his eggs scrambled by the flash-bang and he had a pistol halfway out of the holster. I put a round center mass and knocked him into a row of filing cabinets. He rebounded from the cabinets and fell flat on his face making tiny croaking sounds. Khalid and Top flanked me, drawing and firing X26-A Tasers, which have a three-shot magazine with detachable battery packs. The twin sets of flechettes struck their targets and the battery packs sent fifty thousand volts into each man. The men dropped and the shooters released the battery packs to allow their guns to chamber the second rounds. The packs would continue to send maintenance charges through the flechettes until the batteries ran dry, say about twenty seconds. Four down, four to go.

Lydia pulled another shotgun from under her billowing black chador and hammered an officer into the wall with the beanbags. I pivoted and fired two shots at a screaming cop trying to crawl toward a desk with a phone on it, hitting him once and missing once because he went down that fast. Khalid and Top used the Tasers on the other two.

In the space between the flash-bang and my first shot, I heard an explosion in the cell area. Bunny blowing the back door off its hinges with a blaster-plaster. Then the sound of shotguns and Tasers.

And that fast it was over. Eight men up front, four in the back. All of them down, no fight left in anyone.

I turned. “Warbride, secure the door. Sergeant Rock, Dancing Duck-bag ’em and tag ’em.”

We were using combat call signs. Lydia was Warbride, Top was Sergeant Rock, Khalid was Dancing Duck. I was Cowboy.

Immediately Top and Khalid produced plastic flex-cuffs, which had been designed to hold pipes together but have become a staple of law enforcement worldwide.

One of the officers began to stir. Maybe the Taser flechettes hadn’t lodged deeply enough for him to take the full shock, or maybe he was one of those rare types who can bull their way through it, but he lunged at Lydia and tried to tackle her. Lydia is five eight and one forty. Solid for a woman but far smaller than the cop. However, she stepped into his rush and hit him three times-nose, solar plexus, and groin-in less than a second. The cop went down like he’d been poleaxed. Lydia spun him onto his stomach and cuffed him, then bent and whispered, “Next time, pendejo, don’t let your balls get your ass in trouble.”

Once he was down, my team cuffed the officers by the wrists and ankles and then connected those cuffs, leaving everyone hog-tied. Sponge balls with elastic cords were used to muffle voices. The cops would be able to spit them out once they got their wits about them, but I intended for Echo Team to be a memory by then. Lydia locked the door and pulled down the slatted metal security shutters. Then she started ripping out phone lines, smashing laptops, and crushing cell phones under her heel.

I ran past her, through the security office and into the holding area. Bunny was finishing the last of the hog-tying while John Smith searched the officers for keys. He found them and tossed the set to me as I ran past.

“Green Giant,” I yelled to Bunny. “Talk to me.”

“Last one.”

“Chatterbox, watch the door.”

John Smith nodded and crouched down by the shattered rear doorway. There were people on the street, poking their heads out of doors and second floor windows to see what the fuss was about.

“Drawing a crowd,” he said.

“Out front, too,” called Lydia. “ Truchas! Neighbors are coming!”

The three hikers were in the cells. They looked terrible. Haunted faces, emaciated bodies, fresh bruises, and healed-over scars. However, I noticed that the jailers had provided each of the young prisoners with a big plate of fresh food and plenty of clean water. It was a small courtesy, but it said a lot about the men we’d just roughed up. Human beings. They couldn’t do anything about what had been done to the hikers, and they had no say in what was planned for them-a bullshit trial and either execution or life in a much more terrible state prison-but here, on the street level, these were frightened, starving young people and the cops did what they could to take care of them. They’d even rigged blankets on the bars to give the girl, Rachel, a measure of privacy and dignity. Top saw me looking at that and when I noticed him looking, he flicked an eye to the front room and nodded. I nodded back. There was nothing else to say or do.

The college kids, however, were jabbering and screaming and yelling. The panic was such a huge thing for them that they’d lost all control. Bunny kept trying to calm them down, but his voice was lost beneath the barrage of theirs.

From the doorway, Top yelled, “ Shut the fuck up!” with all the volume that his leather-throated drill instructor’s voice could manage.

The hikers shut up at once and stared at him, goggle-eyed.

I said, “We are United States Special Forces. We’re here to take you home.”

They started yammering again, rushing the cell doors before we could even open them.

“Stop!” I snapped, and they did. Scared as they were, they paid attention, which I knew was going to help make this work. Hysteria would get everyone killed. I was also reassured by seeing them all on their feet. I’ve heard horror stories about prisoner rescues where the people the SpecOps forces liberated were broken and catatonic wrecks who had to be carried out.

One of them, the only woman among them, stepped forward. She wore a scowl that was half anger and half hope. “They tricked us once with something like this. How do we know-?”

“Smart question. When you were ten your mom gave you a guinea pig for your birthday. You named it Olivia.”

Her eyes stayed hard, but they grew wet as well. She nodded.

“God, thank you-” she began, but I cut her off.

“Listen to me. We will get you out of here but you need to do exactly as you’re told. No questions, no talk.”

Khalid produced a PDA and called up photographs, matching them against the faces of the prisoners. “Three for three,” he confirmed and handed the device to me.

I unlocked one cell and handed Top the keys.

“Each of you will go with one of my team. You’ll get into separate cars and you’ll be taken out of the country. You’re going home. This is for your own safety,” I said. “If any one car gets stopped, the others will get away. Now, no more talk… let’s move.”

When I said the word “separate,” they looked terrified and suspicious, but they did not panic. I found myself liking them. I’d had reservations at first-like a lot of people, I guess-because they had put themselves in harm’s way by going on a science field trip in a war zone. But now I understood. These were very tough young people. Resourceful and capable. If they had a fault, maybe it was that they had too much faith in people. I’m not about to slam anyone for thinking that other people will aspire to their higher values. It’s just too bad they got caught in a moment when the Iranian soldiers were not listening to their better angels.

Khalid stepped into the cell with the senator’s son. “Jason McHale?”

The young man saw Khalid’s Arab face and hesitated, but I stepped close.

“He’s an American soldier. Go with him or stay here. Decide fast, kid, ’cause your dad’s waiting for you in Kuwait City. He wants to see ‘Ranger.’”

That did it. “Ranger” was Jason’s nickname as a little boy. Tears welled in his eyes and he tried to hug me. I pushed him gruffly back. I felt for him, but this wasn’t the time.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No need to be sorry, brother,” I said. “When we get out of this I’ll buy the first round.”

He smiled. It was a good smile, conflicted in the moment but that was a veneer over a clear and evident openness. “The next one’s on me.” He allowed Khalid to guide him out of the cell.

Top entered Rachel’s cell and held out a hand toward her, palm up. An invitation rather than a command. “Come on, darlin’” he said in the fatherly way he has. He’s the only Echo Team member with kids. “You can tell me everything I need to know about rare tigers on the way to Kuwait.”

Rachel stared blankly at him for a moment. He had warmth, and you knew on an instinctive level that it was genuine. Then she smiled-maybe her first real and unguarded smile in months.

“Asiatic cheetah,” she corrected as she took his hand. He grinned back at her.

The kid in the last cell, Bryan, was the youngest of the three. His twentieth birthday had happened behind bars. He was also the most clearly damaged, and he stared through the open cell with sunken eyes. It was pretty obvious that the experience had fractured something inside him. Maybe-with luck and the right doctors-he’d find his way out of the dark. Top put a hand on his shoulder.

Top started to say something, but Rachel stepped past him.

“It’s okay, Bryan,” she said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore. We made it. We survived. We’re free. ”

He took a small step forward but that was all. Then Jason stood next to Rachel and said, “You beat them, Bry. Remember what we said after they took us? We’re innocent and no matter what they did to us we were going to stick to the truth. You said that, and Rachel and I went along with you. Well, check it out, brah, you saved our asses with that. You held the line for all of us. Now they’re here to take us home.”

Bryan’s empty eyes gradually filled with something. Hard to put a name on it, because there was a lot of wreckage in the way. Maybe he had gone inside his head to hide from what they were doing to him, but here, in this moment, I think he looked through the shadows and saw the faint light from the door he’d left open.

“Tick-tock, Jefe,” said Lydia quietly, and I nodded.

Bryan took a ragged breath and then took a step forward, reaching through his personal darkness. Taking Rachel’s hand, taking Jason’s. Top helped guide him out of the cell, and I could see the broken boy becoming the man who had walked through hell and survived.

As he passed one of the cops who lay trussed on the floor, Bryan suddenly knelt beside him. At first I thought he was going to lash out at him, but he didn’t. Instead he rolled the man onto his side so that the restraints didn’t cut as deeply into his wrists and ankles. Either kindness to local cops who had been relatively kind to the prisoners, or a statement that compassion should be a factor whenever one person has power over another. It was a small thing, a minor kindness in the middle of a dreadful experience; but it might be the defining moment in the entire experience for the young man.

I was proud of him and I saw the looks in the eyes of Top, Khalid, and Bunny. This was why we do what we do. Not to punish the bad guys, but to make sure the good ones have a real chance.

The silence in the cells was cracked apart by the sound of sirens approaching.

The prisoners looked toward the rear door, new fear blossoming in their eyes.

“Okay, everybody out of the pool,” said Bunny, dialing up the wattage on his Southern California smile. Bunny has a great blend of impressive size, movie-star looks, and surfer-boy charm; but at the same time you know you’re safe with him. It takes a lot of guys to outnumber someone like him.

The sirens were coming fast.

“Warbride?” I called.

“We’re drawing a crowd,” she reported tersely. “We need to get into the wind most riki-tik.”

I ran to the door and peered out. People were pouring out of their houses and converging on the police station. Half of them were yelling into cell phones.

“Dark and stormy night,” I said to Smith, and he nodded. He fished out a smoke grenade and threw it. And another and another. Dense black smoke boiled up from each one. Lydia lobbed flash-bangs into the smoke. Between the thick smoke and the sudden explosions, the crowd screamed and began to scatter, running in every wrong direction, colliding, creating very useful panic.

“Go! Go! Go!” I barked.

Top, Khalid, and Bunny, each guiding a freed hostage, flipped down their infrared visors and ran like hell for the cars we had parked on different side streets.

People were still in the streets but when they saw men with automatic weapons, they stumbled backward toward their houses.

Lydia ran behind them, and immediately cut left and vanished into an alley. The plan was for her to circle the block and reenter the scene as a pedestrian. She looked like every other woman in this conservative part of town. She’d blend in with the crowd and help confuse things with a little whisper-down-the-lane distortion of the facts. Were there six men or twelve? Didn’t they drive away in a white van? The men were bearded. Was that Afrikaans they were speaking? Any good crowd of confused and angry people could be worked like a conductor with a baton.

John Smith covered everyone with his rifle and infrared scope. He was good with every kind of firearm, but as a sniper he was the hammer of God. If anyone made a move on our teams they would get the real thing, no beanbags, no Tasers. Now was not the time to play.

My earbud buzzed and I heard Top’s voice. “One away.”

“Two away,” said Khalid.

“Down the road and gone,” said Bunny.

But by then John Smith and I were already in motion. Our visors showed the heat signatures of the fleeing civilians. And it also showed the heat from the engines of at least a dozen police cars coming at us from different directions. They were closer than we anticipated, and that was not good news. Our window of escape had slammed shut. In twenty paces we were going to be out of the smoke and as visible as gnats on a bedsheet.

“Chatterbox,” I growled, “escape three. Go!”

We had four different escape strategies. The first two were now for shit, and number four involved shooting our way out. Three was less lethal but not much more comforting. We split up, went for the first cover we could find to get off the grid as quickly as possible. It meant dumping all of our gear. Everything.

We each popped a final smoke grenade and ran into the cloud. As they burst, we hit quick release buttons on our belts and shed holsters, cross belts, bandoliers, and harnesses packed with expensive and very useful equipment. Even the iSee devices and earbuds. It all clattered to the ground. When I dropped my helmet I lost sight of John Smith. I crouched while running and tugged at the seams of my trousers. With a screech of Velcro, the pants split apart and flapped behind me. I repeated the action with the shirt. The last thing I did was to grab the medallion hanging around my neck and press the sculpted design in the center. It sent a signal to the gear-weapons, equipment, and even clothing-that released hundreds of tiny thermite micro charges. I heard the whoosh as all of it exploded into flame. Then I yanked off the medallion and tossed it away.

When I staggered backward out of the smoke, faking a cough, I was an Iranian in ordinary street clothes. I yelled in Persian and bellowed for the police, pointing toward the smoke and flames.

Just like every other ordinary citizen was doing.

Chapter Five

That was how it ended. At least for me. Top, Bunny, and Khalid still had to get the college kids out of the country, but circumstances cut me from that team. I knew it was going to be a nail-biter for the guys, but Top was the best team leader in the business. If there was a way, he’d see it done.

I made it back to my hotel room without further incident. John Smith and Lydia weren’t there, but I hadn’t expected them. Each of us had a different bolt-hole and pickup point for a ride out of town.

I didn’t have much in the way of weapons or equipment left at the hotel. Our local contact, Abdul, whom I hadn’t yet met-had come by and cleared everything out. All that was left was my suitcase filled with locally made and purchased street clothes and my shaving kit.

Abdul wasn’t scheduled to pick me up until noon. Plenty of time, I’d thought. I’ll just go get some coffee and a roll and read the paper.

Jeez.

While I waited I thought about the conversation with the mystery lady. She was clearly working for someone-possibly the person I was now waiting for-but there was something extra hinky about the way she “confirmed” my identity. It felt more like she didn’t know who I was and was fishing for that information. And yet she’d known enough about Church to make a crack about how tough it is to make him laugh. Did that mean she knew Church? Or was that a slice of information she’d been given to use to convince me that she knew more than she does. Apparent omniscience is frightening; it intimidates people into saying things they shouldn’t. Cops use it all the time, mostly faking it, to get suspects and witnesses to open up.

So, what did she know about me? That I was a smart-ass. That’s not exactly the best-kept secret in the world. That I worked for someone named Church who didn’t always appreciate my humor? That was a single fact that suggested intimate knowledge. At the time, out there in the awkward moment of having laser sights on me, it encouraged me to perhaps read more into it than was necessary.

The fact that she knew about Church at all was spooky. I was certain that Church’s name was fake. Since I’ve known him I’ve heard people call him Colonel Eldritch, the Deacon, Dr. Bishop, Mr. Priest, and a few other names that were equally phony. I knew of only one person who definitely knew his real name; and one other-his daughter-who probably did, but even I wasn’t certain about that.

Another question was how she found me?

Either I was spotted on the street, ID’d, and followed-which I don’t think is likely, not given how elaborate this all was. Or my hotel was being watched and they’d acquired me there. Safer to brace me on a city street than in my lair. They couldn’t know that the only thing I had in my “lair” was a hungry dog, an extra pair of clean boxers, and a shaving kit. No James Bond gadgets. No lurking ninja army waiting to spring to my defense.

The real bitch was the fact that she had my phone number. That’s really hard to get. It’s not like I’m listed in the phone book under “DMS team leaders with a wacky sense of humor.”

So that was all disturbing on a lot of levels.

Minutes limped by and no visitor. People came into the Starbox for coffee, but most of them left again, joining the burgeoning flow of office drones heading to work. They shambled in like zombies, ordered tea or coffee, and shambled out again with barely a word spoken. It was the same here as it was everywhere else in the world. People are people and most of them have enough on their minds with family, jobs, bosses on their ass, bills to pay, kids to raise, and futures to get to that they don’t give much of a shit about the things that go on in my life. Back in the States we tend to think of Iran as an evil place because we don’t like the extremist ruling government. But… we don’t like most ruling governments, and even the ones running the countries that we do like don’t give much of a shit about us. The one percent at the top of the money heap care about each other, or hate each other, but they all play with each other. The rest of us go about our jobs, and raise our kids, and do our best to stay out of it all.

I watched them come and go. Just folks. I never saw one person that looked alien or evil to me. Not one.

Until he arrived.

This was the guy I was here to meet, no doubt about it.

“Uh-oh,” I murmured.

No need to worry about them reading my lips-they’d probably expect me to say exactly that.

Chapter Six

He was late forties, average height, with dark hair and fair skin. Iranian without a doubt, and the European heritage was there in the aquiline nose, green eyes, and non-Semitic features. Iranians aren’t Arabs. Most people don’t know that, especially the mouthbreathers who lump all Middle Eastern peoples into one group so they can be more easily despised. The name “Iranian” comes from “Aryan,” but the culture draws on ethnic lines from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Lots of nice diversity in a generally good-looking people.

This guy could be a soap opera star. Women would swoon. If they didn’t know who and what he was. If they did… well, I think even the president of the antigun lobby would pop a cap in him and laugh while he did it. The stakes on this bizarre morning encounter jumped about tenfold.

I did know who he was.

He was accompanied by a second man who might as well have had “thug” tattooed on his forehead; he shooed away the only other customers, a pair of middle-aged men, and positioned himself at the door to prevent anyone else from coming in.

The man I was here to meet bought a cup of coffee, told the girl behind the counter to go into the back room and stay there, and then he walked over and stood in front of me. He wore a blue sport coat over a white dress shirt with only the top button undone, khakis, and a pair of hand-sewn Italian shoes. He looked down at me and I sat there; I smiled affably, holding my coffee between my palms, resisting the urge to kick his kneecaps off and stomp him to death.

“Captain Ledger,” he said. Not a question.

When I didn’t reply, he nodded toward the other chair.

“May I?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a free country.”

His mouth twitched a little at that. He sat, perching on the edge of the chair like a nervous Chihuahua ready to bolt. He looked around and then stared out through the window for a moment, then nodded. Not sure if it was to the mysterious woman or the shooters or to himself. This was his home turf, so I was curious why he should be skittish.

He looked at me looking at him. “You know who I am?”

“Yes.”

“If we were in your country I imagine you would like to arrest me.”

“‘Arrest’?” I said, tasting the word. “No… not really.”

“Then-”

“‘Kill’? Sure, that would work.”

He had eyes like a hunting hawk. Piercing, fierce, and almost unblinking. “Why do you believe that it is up to you to judge whether I live or die? I have never killed anyone. I have not spilled a single drop of human blood. Not ever.”

I crossed my legs and leaned back in my chair. “Jalil Rasouli,” I said. “I always thought that was kind of funny. Same name as the artist. I like the artist. He brings something to the world. He uplifts.”

“As do-”

“If you say that what you do also uplifts I will rip your throat out,” I said in a conversational tone, my smile unwavering. Rasouli shut up. I let a couple of seconds pass. I said, “If you know who I am then you should be able to guess that I’ve read your file. Not the public profile, but the real stuff. You say that you don’t have any blood on your hands?”

He said nothing.

“Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhouri-ye Eslami-ye Iran,” I said quietly. His eyes bored into mine. I translated it just to put it out there. “The Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran. MISIRI. Pretty unfortunate acronym.”

Nothing.

“You were the deputy operations chief during the 1999 chain of murders. CIA, Interpol, even some spies in your own government name you as the man behind the whole shebang. No blood on your hands? But how many murders did you green-light? Car accidents, stabbings, shootings in staged robberies. Oh, and all those faked heart attacks-what was it you used for those? Potassium injections? And who were the targets? Soldiers, enemy combatants? No. You went after writers, translators, poets, political activists, ordinary citizens. Iranian citizens. The intellectual class, the ones capable of phrasing a compelling argument against the extremist government. You get that idea from reading Stalin’s biography?”

Jalil Rasouli brushed some lint from his jacket sleeve. “Your Persian is very good; you speak it like an Iranian. Excellent.”

“You should hear my pig Latin.”

He didn’t seem to know what that was and shrugged it off. On a different and mildly perverse level, I was pleased by the compliment. I have a talent for languages and Persian was one of the first I learned. Before I joined the DMS I sat on wiretaps as part of Baltimore PD’s role in Homeland. Listening to endless hours of people talking about ordinary things helps a linguist smooth out the edges of their own command of the language. On the other hand, I’d rather have my fingernails yanked out with pliers before I let Rasouli know that I appreciated his approval.

“Most of the world press thinks you’re going to make a bid for the presidency,” I said. “Oddsmakers say you even have a shot. Not sure it would be an improvement over the current psycho in office.”

He yawned. “You want to provoke me? What do you think I would do? Attack you?” He jerked his head toward the thug. “Or order Feyd to do it?”

“Don’t count too much on that moron.”

“He is very good.”

“His coat is buttoned and he’s leaning against the wall on his gun-arm side. He tries anything, you’ll be dead before he can draw his gun, and then I’ll feed it to him.”

Rasouli considered his bodyguard and gave a noncommittal shrug. “If I am the man you believe me to be, then I could have sent a squad of soldiers here.”

“Maybe you should have.”

He smiled. Son of a bitch had a great dentist. I wanted to knock his caps down his throat. I had to covertly take a calming breath. This guy was not bringing out my best qualities.

Rasouli cleared his throat. For a moment he looked almost embarrassed by his own threat, which I found confusing. With a clear change in his tone of voice he leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. “I am risking much in meeting you here.”

I resisted the urge to prove him right. Instead I gave an encouraging nod.

“I could not go through the regular diplomatic channels,” he continued in a quiet and confidential tone, “for reasons that should be apparent to you.”

“Because your regular diplomatic channels are staffed by vultures, thieves, cutthroats, and scumbags,” I said. “And your own people would sell you out for the price of a bowl of lentil soup.”

“No,” he said, “my own people would sell me out, that is not a question, but it would be for very much money.”

“Ah. So you know that your ambassadors and diplomats are as crooked as a barrel of fish hooks.”

He smiled. “There is a saying: ‘Trust a thief before a diplomat.’”

“That says it.”

“There is a matter of great importance and equally great complexity that needs to be dealt with, but it is so…” Rasouli waved his hand as he searched for the word.

“Fragile?” I suggested. “Volatile?”

“Either will do. Both, I suppose.”

“And you thought it would be easier to discuss it by ambushing me with snipers?”

“Would you have agreed to this meeting without them?”

“Probably not.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Besides… the snipers were already here, preparing for another task. I… borrowed them.” He paused, then added, “That other task is now canceled and will likely be abandoned.”

“What was the other job?”

Rasouli considered, then shook his head. “No, it would confuse things to discuss that. What we are here to discuss is much more important.”

“Before we get to that-why me?”

He spread his hands. “You came highly recommended.”

“By whom?”

“A mutual friend.”

“Give me a name.”

A strange, fierce light flared in his eyes and he studied every inch of my face before he answered. “Hugo Vox.”

Rasouli couldn’t have hit me harder if he’d swung a baseball bat at my face.

“You’re shitting me.”

“Not at all.”

I swallowed a lump the size of a football. Hugo Vox. Now if there was ever an “enemy of god,” then Vox had my vote. Pretty much my vote for “actual supervillain” too. Vox used to be one of the most trusted men in the United States anti- and counterterrorism community, trusted by the kind of people who don’t trust anyone. Vox was a screener for above-top-secret personnel and the director of Terror Town, the most effective counterterrorism training facility in the world. To be “vetted by Vox” was the highest honor and a seal of absolute trust. Unfortunately he turned out to be a murdering psychopath and a founding member of the Seven Kings, a secret society that we believed to be behind everything from 9/11 to the London hospital bombing. A very conservative estimate of the deaths that could directly or indirectly be laid at his door was somewhere north of twelve thousand. I wanted his head on a pole, as did most of the law enforcement agencies in the world. My boss, Mr. Church, most of all.

“How do I know that you really spoke to Vox?” I said in a quiet growl.

Rasouli offered a thin smile. “He said that you might ask that, so he gave me something to say. I suppose it is a code phrase that will mean something to you. It means nothing to me.”

“What is it?”

“Vox told me to say, ‘I vetted Grace and she was clean. She wasn’t one of mine.’”

I had to work really hard to keep what I was feeling off my face. It cost a lot.

Grace.

Damn.

When I’d first joined the DMS a year ago, Church’s senior field officer and my direct superior was Major Grace Courtland. She was as beautiful as she was smart and tough. She had been the first woman to enter Britain’s elite SAS team as a field operative, and she helped build Barrier-Britain’s elite and highly secret counterterrorism rapid response force-and was later seconded to Church when Congress gave him approval to build the DMS. Grace and I went into combat together, we worked together, and we fell in love together. We never should have done that, it was against common sense and every rule in the book. Then, last summer, a professional killer’s bullet took Grace away from me. She died saving the world. The whole damn world. I still hear her voice; still catch glimpses of her out of the corner of my eye. Still feel the absolute yawning, cavernous absence of her in my heart.

She had also been vetted by Vox before coming to work for Church. Some people on both sides of the pond tried to use that to smear Grace’s good name. Church had words with a few of them. I had words with a few others. Word got around and people shut the hell up.

Hearing her name on the lips of this monster filled me with a rage so intense that black poppies seemed to bloom before my eyes. Rasouli watched my face and I could see the delight he took in what he saw. He was like a vampire, feeding off of my pain.

The voices in my head all screamed at me to drag Rasouli to the floor and…

… I closed my eyes for a moment.

Grace.

Thinking of her tricked me into a memory of her speaking my name.

Joe.

The black flowers of hate withered and blew away, leaving a strange, cold control. I smiled at Rasouli and after a moment his smile faded.

“Vox,” I said quietly.

“He spoke quite highly of you. I think he likes you… and he certainly admires you. He called you ‘tenacious.’”

I leaned toward him. “Hear me on this. If you are working with Vox to bring any harm to the United States or its people, I will make it my life’s work to tear your world apart. I’m not talking about government sanctions, and I’m not even talking about a black ops hit. You’ll go to sleep one night and when you wake up it’ll be you and me someplace where you can scream all you want, because believe me you will want to scream.” He started to smile at the brash phrasing, but I leaned an inch closer. “If you’re here then you know who I am, and what I’ve done. You know that most of the wiring inside my head is already fucked. It wouldn’t take much to push me all the way over the line. Look at me. Look into my eyes, tell me if I’m lying.”

His mouth tightened into a hard line as he cut a glance at his bodyguard, who was cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick, and back to me.

He said, “You are correct, Captain Ledger. I do know who-and what — you are. And it is for that reason that I risked so much to meet you.”

“And Vox?”

Rasouli’s lip curled as if he suddenly smelled dog shit on his shoe. “He is an insect to be stepped on. If you are asking if he and I are conspiring together, then no. I would sooner let a desert camel have its way with me.”

“And yet you can call him up for favors any time you want?”

He thought about that, shrugged, took a pen and notebook from his pocket, wrote a string of numbers, tore off the page, and handed it to me. “All I have ever had for him is a phone number. It’s a cell number that we have never been able to trace.”

I looked at the number. “What are the chances that Vox will answer this call?”

“I do not know and do not care,” he said. “Vox is your concern. If you can use that number to find him, then do so with my blessings.”

“Is this the party line?”

Rasouli shook his head. “No. Vox has friends among the ayatollahs, but you probably know that.”

“Is he in Iran?”

“I have no idea.”

We sat for a moment with that floating in the air between us. Then I slipped the page into my shirt pocket. “God help you if you’re lying to me.”

Rasouli frowned, but it wasn’t a fear reaction. It looked as if he was considering another aspect of what I’d said. Perhaps it was the reference to “God.” Whatever it was, he nodded.

“There are times, Captain, that people who share as many ideological and political differences as do we can share a compatible view of something else. In prisons, for example, even the most hardened murderers cannot abide a molester of children.”

I said nothing.

“Before we continue, Captain Ledger, let’s be clear on something,” he said. “I know that it was you who freed the spies last night.”

“Don’t even try,” I warned. “Those three kids were hikers. They’re as close to being spies as I am to being a prima ballerina, and believe me I don’t look good in a tutu.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Are you really so naive that you believe their cover story? I would think someone of your caliber would be in the loop.”

“I am. They’re not spies.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered this kind of thing,” he said. “You always send ‘kids’ to spy on us. You think the veneer of innocence is more convincing than it is. The Peace Corps was created with CIA money. Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization… they’re all fronts and everyone knows it. It’s not even an ‘open secret’ anymore.”

“Horseshit.” I said it loud enough to finally provoke the doofus bodyguard, Feyd, to take notice. I wanted to see how he reacted. He straightened and looked around like an old dog that had just woken from a deep sleep. Rasouli watched me watching and waved Feyd back with an irritable flick of his hand.

“Of course, you would deny it,” Rasouli snapped. “You deny it because you think I’m wearing a wire?”

“I don’t care if you brought a film crew.” I took a sip and set aside my cup. “What’s the play here? Did you really set this whole thing up, the snipers and all, just so you could debate politics with a tourist?”

“Ah,” he snorted with a sour smile. “‘Tourist.’”

“Ah,” I said with a nod in his direction. “‘Human being.’”

“The spies-”

“Hikers.”

“‘Hikers,’ whatever, are not the issue, Captain. We will get them back.”

“Not a chance.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. If I had to guess, I’d bet you a shiny ten-rial piece that they’re eating lunch at the U.S. embassy someplace safe. Kuwait, maybe.”

“Then why are you still here?”

“I’m doing touristy things. I even went to a few museums. Want to see my ticket stubs? Right now, I’m doing nothing more sinister than having a cup of coffee and reading the paper.”

“While waiting for a pickup car, perhaps?” His smile faded. “Captain, let’s not-what’s the American expression? ‘Jerk each other off’?”

I grinned.

“Frankly I don’t much care about the hikers, even though I know you were involved.”

“Yeah? How about the mosque bombing? You don’t want to try and hang that on me, just for shits and giggles.”

“I have no interest in arresting you for anything.”

“Better for everyone,” I said. “You wouldn’t survive the attempt.”

“You are very sure of yourself,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I am. I’m not saying that your guys couldn’t take me-we’re in your country, not mine-but not with you still sucking air. Might even be worth it, though.”

If Rasouli was frightened by my threat he managed not to show it. “We are wasting time neither of us has.”

“Okay. So why are we here? What do you want to talk about?”

His eyes glittered like cold green glass. “Let us talk about saving the world.”

Chapter Seven

“We have to go,” said the tallest of the four women. She was a blocky Serbian with a knife scar across her mouth.

“You go,” said the Italian woman by the window. Although she was younger by twelve years than the Serbian and had less field time than either of the other two-a Castilian brunette and a French blonde-the Italian was the team leader. “I want to watch this.”

The others nodded and began packing their gear-disassembling their sniper rifles and scopes-but the Serbian lingered. It was her laser sight that had danced over the heart of the American agent; it was hers that had wandered down to burn with ugly promise over his crotch. She would have taken that shot, too. Without hesitation or remorse. Now her black eyes bored into the younger woman’s.

“Another team is already on Rasouli,” said the Serbian. “They’ll pick him up when he leaves the cafe. Why are we wasting time?”

The Italian woman turned slowly away from the window and fixed her gaze on the tall Serbian. She held that stare for five full seconds, not blinking, not allowing a trace of emotion to change her expression. It was an old trick, one of Lilith’s-something her mother had used on her countless times-and it worked now, too. The Serbian’s eyes held for four seconds and then slid away.

“I want to watch the American,” said the Italian, letting her gaze linger a moment longer before she turned without hurry back to the window. She made sure not to turn or acknowledge as the three other women finished packing.

After the other two filed out, the Serbian lingered in the doorway. “The American isn’t our-”

“I’ll decide who is and isn’t our concern,” snapped the Italian. When she was angry her tone was identical to her mother’s, and it shut the Serbian up as surely as a slap across the face. It did that with everyone. The Italian gave it a few seconds to set the mood, then she said, “Set up a surveillance post. Two cars. If Ledger leaves the cafe I want to know where he goes and where he’s staying. Upload surveillance photos and data to my personal file on Oracle.”

The Serbian nodded so curtly that it looked painful. “And then?”

“And then go back to the staging area until I call you.” The Italian made sure that her voice carried every bit of Lilith’s icy command. It was an illusion, borrowed power, but it was a useful skill that she’d begun cultivating before she was ten years old.

The other women mumbled something and went out.

When she could no longer hear their footsteps on the stairs she waited another thirty seconds, and then sighed, her shoulders slumping.

Was it ever like this for Lilith? Probably, she thought, and wondered how long her mother had to fake being tough before she actually became the stone-faced, stone-hearted monster she was now.

Knowing her mother as she did, that transformation had probably happened at a much younger age, maybe before she had been abducted by the Upierczi. If it hadn’t been there already, Lilith would never have escaped the pits, never have escaped the breeding pens.

For her own part, the Italian woman did not yet feel that hardness developing within her own soul. Perhaps it all came down to how many people she had to kill, perhaps there was a line that, once crossed, burned away all softness. At twenty-five, the Italian woman could still count the numbers. Every head shot, every cut throat, every garroting and poisoning. Lilith? If even half of the stories were true, then her kills could fill a medium-sized office building. Or an entire graveyard.

The woman believed that all of the stories told about her mother were true.

Every last one.

And everyone in the sisterhood expected her to be her mother’s daughter in every sense.

She murmured a brief prayer in Latin as she bent to peer through the sniper scope at the two figures seated in the coffee shop.

Joe Ledger and Jalil Rasouli.

Why had she lingered to watch?

The question flitted around in her head, fluttering like a bat after moths.

Why?

The obvious reason was to maintain surveillance on Rasouli, who-she hoped-did not know that the team he had hired had been actively surveilling him for three months. The Italian woman’s team was one of several who kept tabs on Rasouli and other key players in the Muslim world. Just as other teams kept a close watch on significant persons in the Christian world. Adding to the general store of information about Rasouli’s whereabouts was the obvious answer to the question.

Obvious, but a lie.

The truth was something that she could never put into a field report. She would not know how to phrase it anyway. A gut instinct. A feeling. In her personal lexicon she called it a “flash.”

They did not happen often and sometimes she never understood what they meant. However, there were too many times in her life when a flash-a moment in which her entire mind and heart were locked onto a single person-proved to be a turning point. Sometimes those flashes saved her life.

Sometimes they forged an instant and inexplicable connection between her and the person who she was destined to kill.

She stayed there, seated on a folding chair, her sniper rifle resting on a bipod which in turn rested on a stack of small, sturdy crates. Not watching Rasouli.

She watched the American. The man who had identified himself as Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger.

She liked the name.

And she liked the man, which surprised her.

Not for the obvious reasons, and even she was aware of that much. To be sure, Ledger was tall and fit, handsome in the rugged way athletes often are. Some rough edges, a few visible scars, a lean waist, and muscular shoulders. That wasn’t it, though.

It was his eyes.

Her sniper scope was of the finest quality. Very precise and powerful. Through it she had looked into the man’s eyes while he joked with her on the phone. She knew that he’d been afraid. Who wouldn’t be with laser sights on him? But he wasn’t afraid in the right way. His was a practical fear, of the kind that only warriors have.

Warrior. She tasted the word. It was grandiose and yet it seemed to fit him quite well. More than that, though, was the hurt she saw in his eyes. Not hurt from anything related to this incident. Deeper hurt, older. That was something this woman understood more intimately than anything else. Her world was built on pillars of pain and suffering.

Was it possible that this man’s soul dwelt in a similar tower? Was that why she felt the flash at the moment when she and her team had first trained their laser sights on him?

If so, then it would genuinely hurt her to have to kill him.

Chapter Eight

I stared at Rasouli. “Saving the world from-what?”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Consider this. If scientists discovered than an asteroid was hurtling toward the earth and was likely to strike in one year, would it not be possible that the best and the brightest from all countries would drop their hostilities and work together to prevent a shared disaster?”

The comment was so weird that it jerked my head into an entirely different place. At the same time my heart started doing another jazz riff. “Christ! Is that what this is about?”

“What? Oh, no… no,” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “I speak hypothetically about the nature of our response to a shared threat too large for any one country to handle alone.”

“Next time say so. You almost gave me a frigging heart attack.”

He smiled at that. Jackass.

“Okay,” I said, “Given the right kind of potential catastrophe, then that kind of cooperation is possible. Even so, red tape would be a bitch.”

“And yet the red tape could be cut if the threat was more imminent, yes? Say that this hypothetical asteroid was due to strike in a month? The need for immediate and uninhibited action would necessitate a quicker exchange of information so that the situation could be handled. After all, global extermination trumps individual ideologies.”

“In a rational world, yes,” I agreed. “Where are you going with this?”

“There is a matter that will require very great and very careful cooperation.”

He removed a cell phone from his jacket pocket and played with the touch screen to bring up a photo, then handed the phone to me. “Do you know what that is?”

I stared at the picture and my mouth went as dry as dust.

“ Good God…”

“Indeed,” agreed Rasouli.

I knew all about them, of course. I had to. I knew the history, studied them for my job, read the field reports. I had seen them in museums and textbooks and on the Discovery Channel. Knowledge may be power but at that moment I felt as weak as a child. Even as a picture on a phone-small and frozen in a snapshot moment of time-it was terrifying to behold.

A nuclear bomb.

“It is a Teller-Ulam design hydrogen bomb,” said Rasouli quietly. “It has a yield of fifty megatons, which is equivalent to fourteen hundred times the combined power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or, if you look at it another way, it has ten times the combined power of all the explosives used in WWII.”

“Where is it?” I snarled, causing Rasouli to recoil from me.

“Please,” he said soothingly, “this device is not on U.S. soil.”

“Then why the hell are you showing me this?”

“Because I need you to know that this is something larger than the political struggles between our countries.”

“Your country has been trying to build this for years, asshole-” I began, but he cut me off, and again had to wave back his guard.

“You don’t understand,” said Rasouli in an urgent whisper, “this is not ours.”

I stared at him. “Then whose is it?”

“I… do not know,” he said. “That is one of the reasons I wanted your help. It’s likely the device is one of many that have gone ‘missing’ since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Russian economy.”

“Just so we’re clear,” I said, “you-Iran-you’re afraid of terrorists with a bomb?”

“Yes.” His mouth was a tight line, “and I’ll thank you not to smirk. This is a very real threat that could cause untold damage.”

“You have any suspects?”

Rasouli shrugged. “We are not a popular country, Captain Ledger. It is the price of being powerful, as you Americans well know,”

“Yeah. Seems like every five minutes there’s a fundamentalist nut job coming at us with a vest of C-4 and the name of God on his lips. Ain’t that a bitch?”

All that earned me was a contemptuous sneer. “This is hardly on the level of car bombings, Captain. Whoever is behind this is organized, extraordinarily well-financed, and subtle. I have reliable sources within Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Taliban and I am convinced they are not involved.”

“They aren’t the only players.”

“No, but they are the ones most likely to consider such a radical plan; and the smaller cells and splinter groups could never make one of these.”

“They could buy one,” I said.

“Of course, but it would be very expensive. Prohibitively so. Most organizations do not have that much money.”

“Hugo Vox could buy one of those with his beer money.”

“Why would he? His day is over.”

“Why? Because the Seven Kings are off the board?”

“No,” said Rasouli. “My sources tell me that Vox is ill.”

“What do you mean?”

Rasouli’s green eyes glittered. “He has cancer, didn’t you know?”

“Shit.”

It was good and bad news at the same time. Good news because it was nice to think about Vox rotting away. Bad because that was a much easier exit strategy than he deserved.

“Could be his last blast,” I said, meaning it the way it sounded.

I thought about what I said but then dismissed it. Vox is many things, but he has never struck me as vindictive. Murderous, to be sure, and merciless, but not petty. To detonate a bomb in frustration for dying of cancer…? No, that would be cheap, no matter what the death toll.

I tried to build a case for it in my mind, but gave it up. It didn’t fit Vox’s pattern at all. For him, killing was only ever a pathway to profit. Even so, I’d want to run this past Mr. Church, Rudy Sanchez, and Circe O’Tree. They built the profile on him that was being used by every law enforcement agency in the world.

“If it’s not Vox,” I said, “then we’re looking at someone who has as big a bank account.”

“Would you like me to recite a list of nations who would love to see Iran reduced to scorched earth?”

“Not really, because you’d start your list with the U.S., Israel, and Great Britain, and they don’t need to buy black-market bombs.”

He shrugged. “That is not entirely true. A case can be made for why such countries would want to have bombs that could in no way be traced back to them. Bombs from former Soviet countries, perhaps.”

“Fair enough. But is that your pitch? Are you saying that it’s America or one of its allies?”

“No,” he said tiredly. “If I thought that, then this discussion would be held in the world press, backed by all of the considerable outrage which it is possible for our propaganda department to muster. The Ayatollahs would probably enjoy that.”

“Bottom line,” I said, “can you tell me where this thing can be found?”

“Much worse,” he said. “I know where four of these things can be found.”

The whole world froze around me.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Worse still,” Rasouli said in a voice that sucked the last shreds of peace from the morning, “there are at least three more that we have not been able to locate. And one of the others might even be on U.S. soil.”

Chapter Nine

He was the King of Thorns.

The King of Blood and Shadows.

He lived in a world of darkness, and that darkness was so beautiful. So subtle. It hid so many things from those who lacked the power to see. It was his mother, his ally, his weapon. It was the ocean in which he swam, the sky through which he flew, the dream in which he walked.

Darkness did not blind him. Even down here in the endless shadows. Buried beneath a billion tons of rock and sand.

Darkness held no surprises for him; he knew its secrets. They had been handed down to him, generation upon generation, and he had shared those secrets with the other pale bodies that moved and writhed and burrowed beneath the earth.

A single candle burned, its flame hidden behind a pillar of rock so that only the faintest of yellow light painted the edges of walls and glimmered on the golden thread of ancient tapestries. A single candle was all the light he needed. More than he needed.

He rose from a bed of fur and silk and broken bones. Ribs cracked beneath his feet. Cobwebs licked at his face as he moved from chamber to chamber. Water dripped in the distance, and the sound of wretched weeping echoed to him from down one of the many corridors his people had carved from the living rock. He paused to listen to the sobs. A female voice, of course. A babble of nonsense words and bits of prayers which combined to make sense only to the mad. There was so much pain there, so much hurt and loss.

It made him smile. It made his loins throb with a deep and ancient ache.

He closed his eyes and leaned against the closest wall. The limestone was cool and damp as he pressed his cheek against it, savoring the rough texture. A tongue tip the color of a worm wriggled out from between his teeth and curled along the thin contours of his lips.

It was as if he could taste the pain, and he craved it, wanting more of it, wanting the freshest and choicest bits.

He was there for a long time, lost in memory and expectation.

“Grigor,” murmured a voice, and with regret he opened his eyes and pushed himself away from the wall. He turned to see Thaddeus, his eighth son, standing a few yards away. The boy had made no sound at all. Excellent. He was learning, he would be ready soon.

“What is it?” asked Grigor.

“ He is here.”

Grigor smiled again. “Good.”

And it was good. In the distance the weeping continued unabated, and that was good too. Soon, Grigor knew, there would be more weeping. So much more.

How delicious that would be.

And how soon.

It was almost time to make the whole world scream.

Chapter Ten

I almost came out of my chair and went for Rasouli.

“Where?” I snarled. Feyd was halfway across the room before Rasouli held up his hand to freeze the moment.

“I don’t know,” he fired back, cold and hard. “Listen to me, Captain, I am here as a friend-”

“Bullshit.”

“As an ally then. In this matter, we are both in danger. Now please, listen for a moment.”

I stayed in my chair. Feyd gave me a hard look and slouched back to his post. Rasouli let out a weary breath.

“You said that there was a device in the States,” I said very quietly. “ Where? ”

“I don’t know where. I’m not even positive there is one in America. Please, let me tell you what I do know.” He gestured to the phone that I still held. “We believe that this device is somewhere inside the Aghajari oil refinery.”

“That’s yours,” I said. “That’s in Iran.”

He nodded. “We don’t know exactly where they’ve placed it. However, I have managed to get some degree of verification through an operative with a radiation detector. I have not risked a full-blown investigation yet for fear that if we started looking it would alert whoever planted the devices that we know about them. That might be a fatal misstep.”

“You think there’s a mole inside your government?”

“There are many moles inside my government, and not all of them are yours, Captain. It is in the nature of what we do that there are spies, and I have very good reason to believe that some of those spies work for whoever has these bombs.” Before I could interrupt him he held up a finger. “What little information I have came to me in a way that has effectively shut the door to investigation. My agent was found dead, the victim of a savage beating. Many of his bones were broken and his internal organs ruptured. My pathologist says that the injuries were apparently delivered with hands and feet. Whoever did it made it last and that suggests either someone with a taste for it or someone who wanted information that my agent was unwilling or unable to provide. However, during the autopsy the surgeon found this.” Rasouli reached into his pocket and produced a flash drive. “He had apparently swallowed it.”

“And didn’t give it up during the beating?” I remarked. “Tough man.”

“Very. One of my best agents. You… would have admired him, I’m sure, but disliked him.” He paused. “The beating is not what killed him, however.”

“What did? A bullet in the back of the head?”

“His throat was torn out,” Rasouli said.

I paused. “When you say ‘torn out’-”

“My people did a thorough post mortem, including all of the appropriate tests for trace particles. Blades leave microscopic metallic residue, and even with plastic knives there are signature markings. There was nothing like that. The pathologist did a reconstruction of the man’s throat and determined that the flesh was torn out by teeth.”

“What kind? Dog?”

Rasouli studied me for a moment. “I don’t know. There were traces of saliva in the wounds that my physician could not immediately identify. I would like to have had DNA testing done on it, but that would raise too many flags.” He fished in his pocket and produced a small metal container the size of a Zippo lighter. “This contains a skin sample packed in CO 2. Your employer has access to more sophisticated equipment than I do. The body has since been cremated, so that is the only remaining sample. I’m trusting you, Captain, and I ask only that you share your findings with me.”

“How?”

He produced his notebook again and wrote a second number; however, he did not give me that sheet of paper. Instead he held it up for me to look at. “That is my private cell. Memorize the number. If you have to call, let it ring once and then hang up. I’ll return your call when I can do so safely.”

I nodded and he produced a pack of matches and burned the page in an ashtray. I glanced at Feyd, but either he didn’t notice or didn’t care.

I pocketed the metal sample case.

“When my agent’s body was found, the police investigators concluded that he had been murdered elsewhere and then dumped where the remains could be found. They reached that conclusion because there was very little blood found at the scene, and such a terrible wound would have bled profusely.”

“So?”

“I believe the police drew the wrong conclusion. I believe that he was killed where he was found.”

“And the blood?”

“This is not the first time there has been a murder of this kind, Captain Ledger. There have been others. Many others, if the reports I collected are correct. Here in Iran, and elsewhere. Syria and Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. I had to dig deeply and quietly to learn that much, but my sources are reliable. In each case the throat was mutilated and the bodies exsanguinated by unknown means. All of the deaths have some political or religious connection, even if tangentially so.” He gave me a strange look. “What do you think of that?”

I sipped my coffee, which was getting cold. “If it’s not a serial killer, then you have a freak. A contract hitter or rogue special operator who has a screw loose. Someone who has created a very specific style for his kills.”

“Why would someone do that?” he asked. “What would be the gain from so grotesque a form of execution? There is no political or religious significance to it, and therefore no message which can be conveyed to an opposition party through it. Do you understand what I mean?”

“All too well.”

We sat there, a pair of gunslingers, fully aware of the graveyards of enemies we’d each buried. Like me, he knew all sorts of killers, from those who pulled the trigger for God and country to those who killed for the sheer joy of it. More than a few of those were drawn to military service or covert wetworks because of the opportunities provided to kill while being afforded the umbrella of official sanction. Not most, of course, but enough so that military psychs and screeners were always on the prowl for them. Either to weed them out or to recruit them. I’d like to say that “we don’t do that sort of thing,” but that would be a lie.

I had my own inner demon who liked to roll around in the enemy’s blood. Mine was on a leash most of the time, but once in a while he got out. If the public at large ever saw that side of me, I’d be labeled a monster and locked up. Looking into Rasouli’s eyes, it was clear that he was thinking the same things about himself.

We were sitting there, a couple of monsters contemplating something worse than either of us.

I cleared my throat. “Bombs,” I said.

He set the flash drive on the table between us. “Because the man swallowed the drive, there has been some moisture damage. I was able to salvage about ten percent of the information. Enough to scare me to death. Enough to make me want to risk this encounter we are having.”

“You said there were seven of them? One in America?”

“I believe there is one in America. One of the documents on the drive gave a list of potential targets in your country. The file was corrupted and there is nothing to indicate that a bomb has definitely reached your shores. That is, as you well know, a difficult thing to accomplish.”

“Don’t look so sad about it.”

He sighed again. “Captain, we may be on different sides of many issues, not the least of which is nuclear power and arms, but I doubt either of us is a fool or an absolute bloody-minded madman. We are entering into a new Cold War, a new arms race, but just as neither America nor Russia launched bombs at each other, no matter how badly they wanted to or how many they had to spare, neither do we. What we want is to be safe, and if having weapons of mass destruction insures that we will never be invaded by a conquering army, then that is only fair. And… more to the point, there is nothing to be gained by mutual extermination. Nothing. Even the most extreme ayatollahs know that, no matter what comprises their public rhetoric. Besides… surely you, a soldier of some reputation, understand the difference between being only able to shout loud and shake a fist and to speak quietly and shake a spear.”

“Walk softly and carry a big stick,” I said.

“Yes. Theodore Roosevelt. The smarter of your two Roosevelts. He understood that one must have power before one can effectively enter into war or peace.”

I studied the picture. The picture showed a bomb the size of a central air conditioning unit for a medium-sized suburban house. The walls around it looked like bare rock; the floor was poured concrete. There were no other details visible. Not on a phone image a couple of inches square. “This is a big unit. It’s not built into a warhead, or at least this one’s not. How are they planning on transporting these devices?”

“I doubt they are,” said Rasouli. “The fragments of information on the drive suggest that as many as four devices are already in place. The ones here in the Middle East. The last time I spoke to my agent, shortly before he was killed, he said that he did not think that any bombs were currently inside the borders of the United States. That was, alas, all that he said on that topic. I ordered him to bring me all of his findings, but he was apparently abducted on the way to my home. Another fragment of a file obliquely mentions America, but there are no other details. Merely the hint that America may be a target.”

“Where are the others?”

“I don’t know. Possibly in Iraq, or India. It’s conjecture though, based solely on similarly cryptic references. One message fragment makes reference to ‘the seven devices.’ That’s all we could recover.”

“Shit,” I said, and if I wasn’t scared enough before I was really starting to sweat now. Given a choice of knowing for sure that there was a bomb in the U.S. and not knowing, I’d prefer certain knowledge. At least then we could start some kind of proper search. “What’s the endgame for all this?” I asked. “What does this accomplish?”

“I don’t know. From a practical stance, I believe they are planning to destroy a significant amount of the oil reserves in the Middle East. Not just what is in the refineries, but in the actual oil fields. Underground devices could ignite much of it-wherever there is sufficient venting for oxygen, and what isn’t burned would be contaminated. Not to mention the destruction of everything that lives and moves on the sands above.”

I shook my head. “Four nukes couldn’t do that. Not sure if seven of them could.”

“Four would be sufficient to disrupt the majority of production. All other refineries would be shut down or scaled down as safety measures. It might takes months or years before each facility could be properly and thoroughly checked, and longer to build newer security systems that would guarantee the safety of the remaining fields and refineries. Think about the impact on the global market. The cost per barrel from noncontaminated fields would be astronomical. The blow would be as much financial as material.”

“You know,” I said, forcing a smile, “that’s just the kind of thing your pal Hugo Vox would cook up. Financial gain was the reason the Seven Kings arranged to have Bin Laden and the Saudis fly planes into the towers, and it’s why they blew up the London Hospital. Have you asked him about this?”

“In a roundabout way, yes. He appeared to know nothing.”

“He’s good at that, the lying sack of shit.”

Rasouli spread his hands. “Now you are where I am, armed with dangerous knowledge and no clear set of answers. In the wake of Vox’s betrayal, I doubt you will be able to completely trust everyone in your government. But you have Mr. Church and the considerable resources at his disposal.”

I grunted. “What made you call Vox in the first place? To arrange this meet, I mean.”

Rasouli showed me his expensive white teeth. “I had been troubling over how to proceed with this matter when the reports came in about the ‘hikers’ being liberated. There are several countries that have teams capable of such an action, but most of them would not risk it, even for as staunch an ally as the United States, therefore it must be an American black operation. Who knows more about that sort of thing than Hugo Vox? I knew that he would know who was responsible and I made a call. He already knew about the action. He did not tell me how, though we are both adult enough to accept that he must still have operatives active in the United States covert community. He gave me you, and now we are here.”

“What would you have done with the flash drive if there had been no drama last night?”

“Have it sent by private courier to your embassy, I suppose. Addressed to Mr. Church.”

I took the drive and closed my fist around it, but I nodded toward his phone. “The photo you showed me? If your agents haven’t put eyes on this thing, then where’d that come from?”

“It was on the drive, too, but I never got the chance to ask how my agent obtained it. There are several badly damaged image files. This is the cleanest one.”

We sat for a moment, looking at each other while so many unsaid things swirled around us. I mean, think about it. Here was a guy I would have gladly killed ten minutes ago. Without hesitation or remorse. I could have cut his throat and then gone to work with a light heart.

And now?

I opened my hand and studied the flash drive. An ordinary device, probably bought at whatever passes for Staples in this part of the world. Now it’s little memory chip was filled with horrors beyond imagining.

Nukes. Under the Middle East oil fields.

“So that’s it?” I asked. “You-pardon the expression-drop this bomb on me and walk off?”

“That is a disingenuous remark, Captain. I risked much coming here. My president and the Rahbare Mo’azzame Enghelab do not know that I am here.”

“And you don’t entirely trust Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader? Wouldn’t they have the same fears as you? I doubt they want to reach paradise atop a mushroom cloud.”

Actually, I deliberately mispronounced his name as Armanihandjob, but Rasouli did not so much as crack a smile.

“I am not in their inner circle,” he said with a philosophic shrug. “They know I have ambitions and the president in particular would not cry if I was found dead with my throat torn out. Besides, in government nothing is as hard to protect as a state secret. They have people that they trust, but I do not know if I can trust the same people.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but you have to admit that it’s pretty weird that you’re bringing this to us.”

He cocked his head at me. “You may neither believe nor care, but I respect Mr. Church. And you, if what I’ve heard about you is true.”

I said nothing.

Rasouli smiled. “I am not fishing for a reciprocal compliment.”

“Good thing. Fishing hole’s pretty dry.”

He shrugged, then asked, “Tell me, do you know the name Salah-ed-Din Ayyubi?”

“Sure. Saladin. General during the Crusades.”

“He was a sultan,” corrected Rasouli. “A great man, a hero of Islam.”

“Wasn’t he a Sunni born in Iraq?” I asked with a smile.

Rasouli shrugged. Iran was no friend of Iraq and 95 percent of Iranians belong to the Shia branch of Islam.

“My point is,” he persisted, “Saladin viewed the world from an eagle’s perspective. What you would call a ‘big picture’ view. It was never his desire to exterminate his enemies, only to defeat them and drive them from the Holy Land.”

“Ah. So, we’re supposed to shake hands like two worldly wise warriors, setting political differences aside for the betterment of mankind. Is that about it?”

“Something like that,” he said without a trace of embarrassment.

I nodded and shoved the flash drive into my shirt pocket.

Rasouli looked down at his shoes for a moment, breathing audibly through his nostrils. Without looking at me he said, “There is one last thing. It’s also on the drive.”

“More bombs?”

He shook his head. “I am not entirely sure that it is related to this matter, but then again I’m not entirely sure it isn’t.” He tilted his head and cut an upward look at me. “What do you know of the Book of Shadows?”

“Isn’t that a CD by Enya?”

His mouth twitched. “What about the Saladin Codex?”

“Nope. What are they?”

He turned toward me now and his eyes looked different. Older. Sadder. “They are two sides of the same very old coin.”

“Meaning?”

“As you do not know what they are, then it is all I’m prepared to say at this point. Mr. Church will see the references on the drive. Perhaps he will know if they are pertinent.”

Rasouli stood up and offered me his hand. I stood and looked from it to him.

“I know you despise me, Captain Ledger, and I do not care much for you. For now, however, we must rise above our individual beliefs and politics and do what we can for the common good.”

“You’re not Saladin,” I said. “And I’m sure as hell not Richard the Lionhearted.”

The hand did not move.

So, I shook it. Fuck it. It didn’t cost anything except a little pride and disgust, and I had a bottle of Purell in my pocket.

“Remember,” he said, “that you have been instructed to wait for ten minutes after my departure before leaving this coffee shop.”

With that he turned and left. Feyd opened the door for him and gave me a single withering stare, which I managed to endure without dying of fright. I stood by the glass and watched them walk around the corner of the building out of sight, presumably to a waiting car.

The next ten minutes took about ten thousand years.

Chapter Eleven

The passenger in the limousine rolled up his window as the tall American agent stepped out of the Starbox. The limousine idled one hundred feet down the side street, mostly hidden by a sidewalk stand selling dried lentils and wheat flour. The American agent looked up and down the street and then turned away and headed in the direction of the hotel district.

The passenger slid open the glass door between the front and rear seats. “Sefu, follow him. We need the name of his hotel but for God’s sake don’t let him see us.”

“Sir,” grunted the driver. Sefu was an Egyptian Christian who had worked for many years in this man’s service. He was not in the habit of letting anyone spot him when he tailed them, though he was circumspect enough not to say so. He put the car in drive and eased into traffic three cars back from the one closest to the American.

In the rear seat, Charles LaRoque, a French businessman and one of the world’s leading brokers of fine Persian rugs, pushed the button to close the soundproof glass partition. He cut a look at the rearview mirror to assure himself that the driver was not watching him, then he fished a small compact mirror out of his pocket. He opened it to reveal that both top and bottom held small mirrors. LaRoque studied his face in one mirror and then the other, back and forth for several moments, tilting the compact and changing his expression over and over again. A strange little laugh burbled from his chest.

“Delicious, delicious, delicious,” he said to the alternating images. There was so much to see there, so many faces. His father and his grandfather. The trickster and the priest. The Red Knights with their red mouths. The King of Thorns. It was all so very delicious.

“Oh yes it is,” LaRoque said, and laughed again.

A soft musical tone filled the car. Not the ringtone of his regular cell but the much more elaborate encrypted device given to him by a friend of his father’s.

“I’ll talk to you later,” LaRoque said to his mirror and shoved it back into his pocket, then closed his eyes and composed himself before he reached for the cell phone. When he opened his eyes he felt composed and ready to play his role.

“Yes?” he said into the phone, his tone serious and sober. Even so, LaRoque almost giggled and caught himself. He took a breath and forced himself to live his role. On this call, and in this matter, he was no longer Charles LaRoque. He was the Scriptor of the Ordo Ruber, the Sacred Red Order. The Scriptor did not giggle. The Scriptor was stern, decisive. That was how the old priest wanted him to play it.

“Was it Ledger?” asked Hugo Vox. “Was he there?”

“Yes,” confirmed LaRoque. “Just as you said.”

Vox laughed. He had a bass voice and a rumbling grizzly laugh. “What happened? What’d they talk about?”

“How would I know?” said LaRoque in a waspish voice. “I was outside in the bloody car, wasn’t I?”

“Charlie,” replied Vox with false patience, “don’t fuck with me. You heard every goddamn thing they said and we both know it.”

LaRoque cut a guilty look at the headphones lying next to him on the car seat. He debated lying to Vox. There was no strategic benefit to it, but lying was fun. But, he sighed instead and grunted. “I listened.”

“And?”

“It wasn’t what we thought,” said LaRoque. “It had nothing to do with the Red Order or the Holy Agreement. Well, at least not much. Rasouli mentioned the Book and the Codex at the end, but he didn’t tell Ledger what they were.”

“Hunh. That’s interesting as shit,” said Vox sourly. “What did they talk about?”

“Some nonsense about bombs.”

“What kind of bombs?”

“Nuclear bombs.”

There was a heavy silence at the other end of the line. “Really.” Vox said it more like a statement than a question. “Tell me exactly what they said.”

As well as he could, LaRoque repeated the conversation between Jalil Rasouli and Captain Joe Ledger. Vox did not interrupt, and when LaRoque was done there was another ponderous silence.

“It’s not our concern,” LaRoque said into the silence.

“Yeah,” said Vox, “I think it fucking well is.”

“I don’t care about that sort of thing. All I care about is whether Rasouli signs the Holy Agreement so we can get back to business.”

“Seriously?” asked Vox. “I mean, holy shit, Charlie, I knew that you were no rocket scientist, kid, but I didn’t think you were actually challenged. Rasouli is bending you over a barrel and dropping his shorts.”

“Nonsense.”

“You said that he gave a flash drive to Ledger. How do you know that it doesn’t have the whole damn story of the Agreement on it? It could have the name of every Scriptor and Murshid, every action taken by the Red Order and the Tariqa for the last eight hundred years. You gave Rasouli that information.”

“Not all of it,” LaRoque said defensively, and despite what he’d said to Vox he was beginning to think the uncouth American traitor might be correct.

“Enough of it, damn it. Enough to have you stood against a wall and shot. Christ, Charlie, if this gets out old ladies and nuns will want to cut your balls off, let alone the Americans and NATO. You should never have-”

“Stop lecturing me, Hugo. I don’t appreciate it and-”

“What would you prefer I do? Leave you to the wolves? Your father and grandfather were friends of mine. I made promises to them that I’d always be there for you, no matter what.”

“You mean, ‘no matter what silly insane Charles did’?”

“If the shoe fits, kid.”

LaRoque looked out the window, trying to catch his reflection in the smoked glass. He needed to see one of his other faces. One of the stronger ones. Or, maybe the face of the old priest. As the car rounded a corner to follow Ledger, LaRoque thought he caught a glimpse of the wizened features of the priest. Just a flash and then it was gone.

It was enough, though. It steadied him.

He drew a breath and let it out audibly. “Very well, Hugo. What do you advise?”

“Good,” Vox said, and LaRoque wondered if the American had also seen the priest. Could Vox do that, he wondered. Did the priest appear to everyone? Or to a chosen few? Or just to him?

“Let’s go on the assumption that Rasouli gave Ledger information that could hurt the Order,” said Vox. “Start there ’cause that gives us a game plan for safety.”

“What plan is that?”

“A very simple one because we need to do two things and they can both be done at the same time,” said Vox. “We have to get the flash drive back and we have to kill Joe Ledger.”

“Only that?”

Vox paused. “To start, yeah. Then we have to decide what to do about-”

Suddenly Vox’s words disintegrated into a terrible fit of wet coughs. Vicious coughs that broke from deep in his chest. The coughing fit lasted nearly a full minute before winding down to gasps. When he could finally speak, Vox cursed.

“Good lord, Hugo, are you all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, shit,” Vox wheezed. “These chemo treatments are kicking my ass.”

The Scriptor took a moment to make sure that his voice was filled with concern, even if his mouth was trembling with a smile. “Are you in much pain?”

“A bit.”

“I’m sorry.” He almost said, “Oh, goody.”

“Yeah, well. Life’s a bitch and then you’re dead for a long time.” Vox cleared his throat. “Look, the bottom line is that you have to get that flash drive back and you have to do it right fucking now.”

“Why the hurry? I looked him up in our database and he appears to have been competent, yes, but not-”

“Don’t be an idiot. You only have his army and police records. I’ll send you his DMS file. It makes interesting reading.”

“You’re saying he’s a threat?”

“I’m saying that he’s Mr. Church’s pet psychopath. Don’t underestimate him. Ledger’s a weird cat, but he’s sharp and he is fucking relentless. He’s also got some freaky mojo.”

“‘Mojo’?”

“Luck. Son of a bitch is either lucky or unlucky, depending on how you look at it, but he always seems to be in the thick of things. Should have been dead a dozen times, but even though bodies stack up around him the cocksucker keeps finding a way through to the other side.”

“An angel in his pocket?” mused LaRoque. He looked down in surprise to find that his hand held the little compact mirror even though he had no memory of removing it from his pocket. He watched as his manicured thumbnail popped it open.

“You need to send a knight after him,” said Vox, and LaRoque almost dropped the compact.

“What? No. You have whole teams of Sabbatarians in Tehran-”

“Forget those fruitcakes. Ledger would have them for lunch.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“I’m not. Ledger and his team dismantled my Kingsmen last year, and no one’s ever done that before. And I have it on good authority that Ledger beat Rafael Santoro one-on-one.”

That made the Scriptor pause. Santoro was the chief assassin of the Seven Kings, a man whose utter ruthlessness was only equaled by his nearly matchless skills as a combatant. Santoro was one of the very few ordinary men who might stand a chance against a knight. Not a full-blooded knight, of course, but one of the trainees.

“Ledger killed Santoro?”

“I… don’t know,” admitted Vox. “All I know is that they fought and then Santoro was gone, off the radar. And it’s not the first time Ledger’s beaten the odds. Don’t risk a Sabbatarian team. You have the Red Knights. Use one of them.”

The Scriptor looked at the two aspects of his face in the mirror, angling the compact one way and then the other, back and forth as the silence grew. The bottom mirror showed his own weak mouth, the top showed his indecisive eyes.

“Charlie-?” prompted Vox.

LaRoque flipped the mirrors forward and back, over and over again until the top image changed. From one heartbeat to the next the image changed from his own reflection to the face of the priest. Wrinkled skin, a slash of a cruel mouth, and eyes that were a strange swirl of colors-leprous brown and ophidian green.

Do it, whispered the voice in his mind. The voice of the priest.

LaRoque took a steadying breath. “Very well, Hugo, I’ll do it. I hope you appreciate the great faith I’m showing by trusting you.”

A snort of laughter came down the line. “You’re showing great intelligence by trusting me.”

“Others might disagree, considering what happened to your organization.”

“Nothing happened that I didn’t want to happen,” Vox said with a little edge to his voice. “I used Ledger and Church to turn a losing situation into a winning one.”

“Winning?”

“Am I in jail? Am I dead? Fuck no. Did I stroll away with a hundred billion dollars in numbered accounts? You bet your left nut I did. Am I still raking in about a couple of mil a week from that shit? You can bet your right nut on that one. So, yeah, I put the DMS to work for me and they don’t even know it.”

“Not even Church?”

“Maybe Church,” Vox conceded after some thought, “but he can’t do jack shit about it. He can’t want to kill me more than he already does. So, call me when Ledger’s dead.”

Vox disconnected.

For several moments LaRoque held the phone to his ear with his right hand and stared at the face of the priest in the compact mirror he held in his left.

Then it was gone. LaRoque blinked. The mirror now held only his own reflection.

“You made the right choice,” said the priest.

The Scriptor slowly raised his eyes and stared at the wizened figure who now sat across from him in the back of the limousine. The priest had eyes the color of toad flesh, and his skin was as sallow and thin as old parchment. When he smiled, his teeth were white and wet.

Charles LaRoque smiled back.

“Thank you, Father Nicodemus,” he said.

Chapter Twelve

I walked back to the hotel, and with each step I tried not to scream. I wanted to run back, but I didn’t dare draw attention to myself. It was bad enough I was sweating and probably looked nervous and guilty. There were so many ways this could play out, most of them bad, and I didn’t know how we were going to play it.

Inside my head the word “nuke” kept echoing.

About every third car on the street was either a police sedan or a military jeep. Even though the rescue of the hikers wasn’t in the morning papers, it was clear from the activity on the street that the government was mobilized. Although the hikers had been illegally arrested and unfairly held, Iran had never budged from its stance that the kids were spies and that they’d crossed the border. At the time Echo Team went wheels-up to come here, the State Department had not yet decided how to announce the event. A lot of it, I knew, depended on whether we were successful, on the physical and mental condition of the rescued hikers, on the degree of resistance during the raid, and whether we got caught. The mission had gone by the numbers except for the end; and though I had no doubt Top had managed to get the kids out of the country, at least one American still had boots on the ground here.

If John Smith or Lydia had missed their rides, then the math got more complicated. The local government needed only one of us to create a media shit storm. The fact that there wasn’t yet that storm suggested that none of my people were in the bag. I did not want to be the one to let the team down; and I had no illusions about Church dispatching a team to haul my ass out of jail. There was no political profit in that. He’d disown me and wipe my records.

That’s exactly as comforting as it sounds.

I knew that Church was advising the president and the secretary of state about how to spin this thing. Spin control for global disasters was one of his most endearing talents.

And, of course, there was the whole nuke thing. Talk about skewing the math. Rasouli oversaw much of the nation’s misinformation and propaganda and he was the one who wanted me to find the nukes. Did that mean he was influencing the manhunt process? No one had a physical description of me, at least no one attached to the rescue; but Rasouli and his sniper psycho babe were able to spot me and put a laser sight on me at a coffee shop. How’d that happen? Even with Hugo Vox advising them, how’d they know where to acquire me?

“Joe,” a voice said.

I spun around, sure that someone stood right behind me, whispering in my ear. But I was alone on the street. The voice… I knew that voice.

Her voice.

“Grace?”

My heart was pounding and the ground under me felt like it was tilting. But there was no one close enough to have spoken my name.

Chances are that no voice spoke and that I was crazy as a loon. Chances, not guarantees.

Grace.

I searched for the echo of her voice, of that one word, inside the fractured darkness of my mind, but it, like she, was gone. Tears wanted to burn their way out of my eyes. I wanted so badly to find a place of shadows, a doorway or the back of an abandoned car, somewhere I could hide. Ever since Rasouli dropped the first two bombs on me-Hugo Vox and Grace Courtland-I felt like things were starting to unravel inside my head. It made me feel as if everyone was looking at me, as if everyone knew who and what I was.

I used every ounce of strength and will I possessed to compose my face and show absolutely nothing. It cost me, though.

The Israelis operated a news and cigarette shop a block from my hotel and I stopped by there and browsed the papers until the shop was empty. Then I drifted over to the counter. The man who ran the place looked and sounded Iranian but I knew for a fact that he was Mossad.

“Carton of cigarettes,” I said. “Do you still carry Bistoon?”

He smiled. “We get no call for it, I’m sorry.”

It was the proper call sign and response that identified me as an American agent. We both glanced around the shop to verify that we were alone.

“What do you need?”

“Cell phone battery.” I showed the phone I had, which was a DMS design built on a local model. Even though my unit had some extra goodies built in, it was designed to work on a standard cell battery that could be found anywhere in Iran.

“I can have it for you in half an hour. Will you wait or do you want it delivered?”

“Delivered.” I told him my hotel and room.

He studied my face and frowned. “I will not ask what is troubling you, my friend, but it appears that you are having a bad day.”

“You have no idea.”

Before I left I bought a pack of goat jerky. I had a hungry dog waiting for me in my hotel and if I didn’t come back with food he’d sulk all day.

I paid for the goat.

“May your day improve,” said the shopkeeper.

“Yeah,” I said from the doorway. “Here’s hoping.”

As cops and soldiers cruised by and peered at every civilian with suspicious eyes, I forced myself to walk normally. I willed myself not to be noticeable. I needed to punch and pound the fear and grief and paranoia down into its little box. Walking a few blocks seemed to take absolutely forever. By the time I reached my hotel my hands were shaking so badly I had to jam them into my pockets.

I climbed three flights of stairs, dropped my keys twice, and finally opened the lock. As soon as I was inside I closed and relocked the door and fell back against it with an exhale that came all the way up from my shoes.

My dog, Ghost, was waiting for me, wagging his tail and looking at my hands to see if I’d brought him anything. He’s a big white shepherd, 105 pounds of muscle and appetite. Ghost was cross-trained in a variety of useful skills from combat to rescue; and though he was useful in ordinary bomb detection, he couldn’t disarm a nuke.

I knelt down and hugged him. I kissed his furry head.

“This one’s going to be a bitch, fuzzball,” I told him.

He looked at me with those liquid dog eyes that always seem deep and wise. He whined a little, catching my mood or perhaps smelling my fear. Then his whole body went rigid as he stared past me. Not to the closed door, but to an empty space on the wall. I followed the line of his gaze, willing myself to see what he saw, but a dog is a dog and they see things we can’t. No matter how much we want to.

I listened to the silence, wondering if I’d just heard a soft voice whisper my name again.

But, no… there was nothing.

When I looked at Ghost, he was no longer staring at the wall.

“What is it, boy?”

Ghost, being a dog, just looked at me.

I mean, really… what had I expected him to say? My palms were sweaty and I wiped them on my thighs. Then I fished some dried goat strips out of my jacket pocket and dropped them on the floor. Ghost is peculiar in that he eats his food delicately, one piece at a time, making it last.

Minutes crawled by as I waited for the Mossad shopkeeper to send over the battery. The thought of those moments being chipped off the block of time remaining until those nukes went active was making my heart hurt. I was sweating and it wasn’t the heat in that stuffy little room.

I fished for more goat and my fingers scrabbled over the flash drive. That drove everything else out of my head.

Rasouli said that there were four nukes scattered throughout the Mideast oil fields, and three more unknowns. Maybe one in the States.

“Holy God…” I breathed. Ghost cut a sharp look at me and gave a soft woof.

Chapter Thirteen

First Sergeant Bradley Sims saw the army truck stop at a crossroads at the far end of the valley. Roadside lights cast the area in a golden glow. He turned off his headlights, slowed his car, and pulled behind an abandoned grain warehouse where he could observe the street through a chain-link fence. The soldiers began off-loading sawhorse barricades.

“No! Oh, god, no!” cried the young woman beside him. Rachel had a cinnamon colored shawl wrapped around her head and face, but the eyes that peered out from under the shawl were bright with new tears. “God, please don’t let them take us back.”

Top pasted on a smile that was filled with far more confidence than he felt. “Not a chance, darlin’.”

He removed a small pair of high-powered night-vision binoculars and steadied his forearms on the wheel as he peered at the men: checking their uniforms, their weapons, their body language, and apparent combat readiness. You can tell a lot about soldiers by how well they go about ordinary tasks. Mediocre ones slouch through it, as if laziness were the best part of down time. The best ones did everything with a degree of polish and professionalism so that even something as simple as erecting a roadblock was done right and done right the first time.

The men at the crossroads did not appear to be a gang of slackers.

Not good.

He tapped his earbud. “Sergeant Rock to Road Trip. On me. No lights. Stop and listen.” Behind him, scattered hundreds of yards apart, the other two cars crept slowly through the shadows, running without headlights.

“Okay, ladies and gents,” Top said into his mike, “this is about to get fun. Here’s what I need and I need it now. First, I need a volunteer-snake oil salesman, feel me?”

“I’m in,” said Khalid.

“Roger that, Dancing Duck. Green Giant, that means you’re Jack-in-the-box.”

“Rock ’n’ roll,” agreed Bunny, and he sounded happy about it.

“Converge on me. I’m Santa Claus.”

He tapped out of the channel.

Rachel grabbed his sleeve. “What was all that? What’s happening?”

Top held up a finger. “My orders are to get you three over the border and into Kuwait. To do that I have to get past that roadblock. I’d go a different way but every other route keeps us in country for at least an hour, and we don’t have that hour. I’ll be straight with you. Best guess is that Iranian military helicopters will be here in fifteen, twenty minutes-we need ten to make it to our LZ and that’s going all out, balls-to-the-walls crazy.”

“‘LZ’?”

“Landing zone. We got our own helo coming, but it can’t come this close to a town or we’d start a war that nobody wants. That means that we have to get through that security checkpoint down there.”

“They’ll know who I am!” she yelped. “They’ll just take me back to that awful place. You don’t know the sort of things they did to us in there.”

“I pretty much think I do, darlin’. That’s why we’re not going to let you get taken. I need you to do what I say, and help me help your friends. Can you do that?”

Her eyes were huge and filled with fear, but the young woman was tough and she took a breath that steadied her trembling hands. She nodded. “Okay.”

“Good. Here’s the plan.” He told her what he had planned, and her eyes went wide with fear and doubt.

The other cars pulled in behind Top’s. Doors opened and immediately Khalid and Bunny quick-walked the two young men toward the lead vehicle.

“Everyone in the back,” said Top. “Stay together and stay down. Things might get loud but you will be safe. No questions now. Let’s go.”

Before he closed the door he made brief eye contact with Rachel, and she nodded and even managed a brave smile. She guided the two young men through the shadows into the back and then squeezed in. There was just enough downspill from the warehouse’s pale security lights to see as she made sure everyone was buckled in tightly. Rachel kept talking to the others, soothing them, calming them. Top reached out and gave her shoulder a single squeeze, then closed the door. He stepped a few yards away and consulted briefly with Khalid and Bunny, and then climbed back behind the wheel of his car.

“What’s happening?” asked Senator McHale’s son.

“Rachel will tell you,” said Top. “Then I need you all to be real quiet. Don’t ask questions and absolutely do not talk to me or interfere with me until I say it’s all clear.”

“Okay,” assured Rachel, and the two young men nodded.

Top turned away as Khalid switched on his headlights and pulled his car onto the road.

“Where’s the other man?” asked the girl. “The surfer guy?”

Top chuckled at that. “Oh, you never can tell where Farmboy’s going to pop up.”

He gave Khalid’s car a long lead, then switched on his lights and followed.

The sergeant at the crossroads held up his hand and then patted the air, indicating that Khalid should slow down and stop. Two soldiers converged on the front of the car from either side, using the flashlights clipped to their rifles to sweep the vehicle. The other three soldiers walked around back, their lights and barrels pointed at the trunk.

Top’s jaw was tight with tension. Timing was going to be critical. If Khalid made an error, he’d be dead in the next few seconds, and then everything would go to shit. He cut a look into the rearview mirror, at the faces of the three freed hostages. They had been held for a year. A whole year carved out of their lives because Ahmadinejad liked using kids as chess pieces in his political games.

Top knew that firing live rounds would likely result in a major political incident, possibly even a renewed threat of war. But there was no way on earth he was going to let Iran take these college students back.

He gripped the steering wheel hard enough to make it creak.

“Papers,” ordered the sergeant, shining a small flashlight directly into Khalid’s face. “Name and destination.”

Khalid squinted into the light as he handed over his papers, which were in a cheap vinyl folder of the kind most people in Tehran carried. His car was a late-model sedan, suggesting that he was at very least someone of note. Moneyed, or perhaps attached to the massive political machine that squatted over the whole country.

One of the guards looked in through the passenger window, peering into the footwell and the backseat, but there was nothing to see. Khalid gave them the false name that matched the ID, and spun a quick story about going to have an early breakfast with a business associate in a small border town. If the soldiers had a computer uplink and ran a check, everything would be there to verify the story.

“Open the trunk,” the sergeant said as he handed back the papers.

“Certainly,” said Khalid and he reached down to pop the latch. Instead he pulled the pin on a flash-bang and simply dropped it out the window at the sergeant’s feet. The sergeant stared down it, totally shocked despite his training. He started to yell a warning, but instantly the flash-bang burst with tremendous force, battering the sergeant away from the car.

As soon as Khalid dropped the device he threw himself sideways and pressed his hands against his ears. The flash filled the night with a brilliant white light. The accompanying bang caught one of the soldiers in its blast radius, and the man screamed and spun away in an awkward pirouette. The other three soldiers whipped around toward the blast and never saw the trunk flip open and two more flash-bangs whip up into the air. The grenades burst five feet above the car hood, catching all three soldiers with its terrible burst of blinding light and crushing noise.

Then Khalid kicked open the door and Bunny rolled out of the trunk. The soldiers were on their knees or leaning against the car, holding their heads. One of them tried to fight through the pain and bring his rifle up, but Bunny drove an uppercut into the man’s stomach that lifted him ten inches off the ground. Bunny pivoted and grabbed the other two closest guards, knotting his huge fists around the backstraps of their Kevlar vests. He pulled them off the ground, swung them apart, and then slammed them together with a huge bellow of effort. The helmets collided with a sound like a church gong and the men instantly went slack.

On the far side of the car, Khalid kicked the dazed sergeant in the groin and then hammered the top of his helmet with the bottom of a hard fist. The sergeant dropped on his face and Khalid stepped on his back as he dove at the remaining soldier, who was staggering backward, shaking his head, and trying to pull his shoulder microphone. Khalid slapped the mike out of his hand, grabbed his helmet, and yanked the man’s head down onto a rising knee.

And then it was over. Five men down, and down hard. Alive, but they wouldn’t feel lucky about it when they woke up.

Top watched all this with narrowed eyes and no trace of compassion. Like the rest of Echo Team, he’d had some compassion for the cops in the police station. For the soldiers? None at all. The military had been in charge of the hikers for a year and had abused and starved them. If Mr. Church hadn’t given a no-live-fire order, Top knew that his guys would be cutting throats.

Now was the not the time to play “what if,” though. He gunned the engine and rocketed toward the crossroads, reaching it only seconds after Bunny kicked the barrier out of the way. There was a roar behind them and Top saw Khalid’s headlights flick on.

The two cars raced through the night; the third vehicle abandoned back at the warehouse. As they drove, Khalid pulled ahead and took point. The closer they got to the rendezvous point, the better the chance that they might meet the kind of resistance that wouldn’t be stopped by a couple of flash-bangs and some fisticuffs.

“Are we safe?” whispered the young woman in the back seat. “God… are we safe?”

Top said nothing. There were miles to go before he would know the answer to that question.

Chapter Fourteen

The last thing the businessman in the bad suit did that day was open the door to his hotel room. He was undressing to take a shower when he heard the soft knock and padded barefoot to the door, a frown creasing his jowly face. He was neither expecting nor wanting a visitor of any kind. His frown deepened when he saw that it was a woman who stood outside, her face hidden by a modest chador but burdened with a heavy black canvas equipment bag whose strap was slung across her torso.

“Who-?” began the businessman, and the woman shot him in the chest with a pistol that had been hidden beneath her flowing sleeve.

The businessman gave a single croaking bleat, and then his eyes rolled up and he fell backward onto the floor. The woman kicked his legs out of the way, checked that the hall was still empty, stepped inside, and closed the door.

The Italian woman knelt and pressed her fingers against the businessman’s throat. The pulse was there, steady and rapid, though she knew it would slow down within seconds. The gun she used was a Snellig gas-dart pistol, its tiny glass projectiles were loaded with horse tranquilizer.

She unslung the heavy bag, laid it on the bed, unzipped one of its many compartments, and removed a scope. Then she crossed to the window and put the scope to her eye. The Serbian subcommander of her team had followed Ledger after the meeting with Rasouli had ended, tailing him to a store and then to the Golden Oasis Hotel. After determining the floor and room number, the Serbian gruffly asked for further orders.

“Go back to the staging area,” answered the Italian. “File your report and wait for me.”

She hung up before the Serbian could ask another question.

It was an easy matter to decide on a vantage point from one of the surrounding hotels. She used her Oracle computer to hack the booking records for each hotel until she found a perfect spot. Now she controlled a safe vantage point and peered through the scope to count floors and windows until she found the right one.

At first all she saw was a balcony, sliding glass doors, thin sheer curtains beyond which a bleak room was occupied only by Joe Ledger and a large dog. Ledger sat on the floor, petting the dog. She adjusted the scope to study the animal. It was a beautiful white shepherd, and that made the Italian frown. Was the dog’s color a coincidence or was there another element to this man? Was he tied to the Sabbatarians? Was that a fetch dog?

That question would need to be answered, because it might mean that Ledger would have to die right now.

Still frowning, she removed her sniper rifle from the canvas bag. The rifle was not in parts. She had spent too much time carefully sighting it in to have it all spoiled by disassembling the weapon. Only the stock was detached and she clicked it into place and then mounted the weapon on a tripod. Like most professionals in her craft she preferred shooting from a prone position, or kneeling with a bipod, but she had no idea how long she would have to wait here in this hotel room, so a tripod was more practical. It reduced the risk of muscle fatigue.

She mounted the scope onto an American McMillan Tac-50 bolt-action sniper rifle and loaded it with. 50 caliber Browning machine gun rimless cartridges, lean and long and completely lethal, even if she was forced to take a body shot instead of the preferred head shot. Not that she would have. The Italian sniper had not missed a kill shot in many years. She had learned the craft from the greatest shooter who ever lived, Simo Hayha, the legendary Finnish shooter known in international sniper circles as the White Death, and rightly so. During the Winter War between Finland and Russia in 1939 and ’40, Hayha had racked up 705 confirmed kills. Five hundred and five with an iron-sighted bolt action rifle, the rest with a submachine gun. Hayha endured murderous subzero temperatures as low as minus forty Celsius and in less than one hundred days had been an angel of slaughter to the Russians, sometimes stuffing his mouth with snow so his breath did not condense and reveal his position. Even after taking a bullet to the face he survived and escaped capture.

Hayha had been one of many tutors Lilith had hired to prepare her for the life she led. And though he was ancient and near death, his mind was sharp and his lessons profound. Hayha had been a master killer, and yet his eyes were always calm, always peaceful. The Italian never understood that. When she looked in the mirror she saw the eyes of some vile thing. Something tainted and impure. Something evil.

She sat in a folding chair in the shadows of the hijacked hotel room. No lights except the indirect light from the open window. Above her, a rickety ceiling fan turned continuously and there was a breeze from outside, but the curtains did not move. They were weighted down with rocks she had brought upstairs with her for that purpose. Blowing curtains could spoil a shot and they draw the eye. She did not want to attract any attention.

Ledger still sat on the floor.

The sniper leaned back from the rifle and removed a small leather case from her bag, unzipped it, and propped it on the night table. The device was the size of an e-book reader but it was a very powerful portable computer with a satellite uplink. The sniper booted the device, entered her password, and activated the voice interface.

“Authorize Arklight field protocol five.”

The monitor flashed several times and then settled on a screen saver with the smiling face of the Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa spoke.

“Oracle welcomes you.”

The Oracle computer had been designed by a man named St. Germaine but re-programmed by her mother; the voice was hers as well, though with a slight alien quality when composing unique phrasing. The sniper had added the animation of the Mona Lisa to give it a less threatening feeling. She loved her mother but, like everyone else who ever met her, was deeply intimidated by her. Even the other two Mothers of the Fallen deferred to her.

“Access all data for mission coded Arklight eight-one-one-seven.”

“Accessing. Do you want to update your field report?”

“Yes.” She gave the computer a detailed report beginning with the phone call from Rasouli that morning and the resulting change in the mission for which her Arklight team had been contracted. At the conclusion of the report she said, “Collate data. I will want a set of probabilities.”

“Collating,” said Oracle. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Yes. I want everything you can find on Joseph Edwin Ledger. White male, early thirties, American.”

“There are ninety-seven unique instances of living people named Joseph Edwin Ledger; one-hundred and sixteen for deceased-”

“Stop. Subject is likely military or ex-military. Possibly law enforcement.”

“There is one instance of a Joseph Edwin Ledger with the Baltimore Police Department in the state of Maryland. There is also one instance of a Joseph Edwin Ledger with the United States Army Rangers. Personal identification numbers and Social Security numbers match.”

“Open a file on him. I want everything. Ledger’s background. Service record, awards, citations, reprimands, psych profiles, his politics. Anything you have.”

“There is already an active Arklight file on this subject.”

“When was the file opened and who opened it?”

The computer gave an open date from July of the previous year. “The file has an L1 code.”

L1. Lilith.

“My mother opened that file?”

“Yes.”

“Summarize the content of that file.”

Oracle began reading out information regarding several matters of grave international importance. The Seif al Din plague, which coincided with the opening of Ledger’s file. There were others, all high profile. The shutdown of the ultrasecret vault in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania; the famous Jakoby-Mengele file; and others, leading up to the Seven Kings event last December. The records were spotty and included more speculation and unofficial information than hard evidence. As the Italian woman well knew it was virtually impossible to prove anything about the DMS. Very often files of this kind suddenly vanished from even encrypted hard drives. There were rumors of a DMS supercomputer called MindReader that had an aggressive search and destroy subroutine for ferreting out this kind of information.

“Oracle,” she said, “have you been attacked in any way since this file was opened?”

“No.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“There is a note in the file stating that any questions of this kind be directed to Lilith herself. Your mother does not permit additional speculative notes to be added to the file. Would you like me to pass along a request to your mother?”

“God no,” said the sniper before she could stop herself. “No,” she corrected.

“Shall I continue reading the subject’s service record?”

“Yes.”

Ledger reached out and pulled his dog toward him, wrapping his arms around the animal and laying his head on the dog’s shoulder. What an odd thing for a man like him to do, she thought. A strangely human act, totally at odds with the things Oracle was saying: that he was emotionally fractured, that he was utterly ruthless in a fight, that he had killed people with guns, knives, explosives, his hands. However, the way he held his dog and stroked the animal’s fur and spoke to it-even though she could not hear his words-made her smile.

“Oracle, stop report,” she said. “How did my mother obtain the information for her file on Ledger?”

“That information is in a subfolder marked eyes-only. Would you like to request temporary clearance to read that report?”

The sniper took a breath, then let it out slowly. “Yes.”

“That request has been forwarded to the Mothers.”

“Continue report.”

Oracle moved from the bland details of an unremarkable military record, through a moderately interesting though short police career. The sniper found nothing of real note there, however, except that Ledger had been scheduled for enrollment in the FBI academy. There were no records of his having actually entered the academy. What really caught her interest, however, were Ledger’s psychotherapy reports and transcripts of sessions with Dr. Rudolfo Ernesto Sanchez y Martinez. Ledger was a deeply damaged individual who had a minimum of three and possibly as many as nine separate personality subtypes living in his head. Dr. Sanchez’s records indicated that Ledger had found a way to balance these personalities and even put them to work, like a committee, within his fractured mind. It was not a unique occurrence, but it was very rare; and rarer still for such a man to be accepted into the police department and, apparently, the Department of Military Sciences.

“Stop. Who recruited Ledger into the DMS?”

“Unknown, though there is a high probability that he was recruited directly by St. Germaine.”

The sniper’s pulse quickened as it did every time she heard that name.

St. Germaine.

That was one of the many names for a man currently using the name Church. St. Germaine was the name her mother used for the man. The sniper had never met him, but other Arklight agents told wild stories. She doubted most of them were true, but all of them were fascinating.

“Oracle,” she said, “why might St. Germaine risk using a field operative with Ledger’s psychological profile?”

“Unknown.”

“Speculate. Access all known data on St. Germaine and cross-reference.”

“There are one hundred and three separate field reports that include the man code-named St. Germaine under twenty-eight aliases. Twenty-six of those reports indicate a tendency to use agents with unpredictable or unstable personality types. Four of the six analysis reports uploaded by senior Arklight operators postulate that Mr. Church uses said unpredictable personalities to introduce random elements to missions.”

“An X factor?”

“That is the theory most commonly postulated.”

“What is the probability that Mr. Church sent Ledger to Iran knowing that he would become involved in my current mission?”

“There is insufficient data to calculate a complete probability model.”

“Fuck.”

“I am unable to perform that function, as you well know,” said Oracle in her mother’s dry voice. It was one of the messages Mama had added to the database. An attempt at humor.

“What is the likelihood that Rasouli knew my team was associated with Arklight?”

“Unknown, however the mission for which your team was originally contracted has multiple connection points to the Mothers of the Fallen and-”

“What is Rasouli’s connection with Joseph Ledger?”

“Unknown.”

She processed that as she made some minor adjustments to her rifle.

Why had Rasouli wanted to meet this man? Was he an intermediary? Or, more likely, was Rasouli trying to recruit him as a double agent? Despite the poverty most of the people in this country endured, the government was very rich, with pockets deep enough to tempt saints and angels. The sniper had seen that firsthand in the absurd amount of money Rasouli had paid to have her team provide security for half an hour in a coffee shop.

“Oracle, give me a probability estimate on Ledger’s loyalty.”

“That question lacks specificity.”

“Based on Joseph Ledger’s psych profiles, can he be bought? Could Rasouli buy him away from the DMS?

“Unknown.”

“But we can’t discount it?”

“That would be unwise.”

She peered through the scope. Ledger was still sitting on the floor with his dog. Was he crying? The blowing curtains on Ledger’s window made it impossible to tell, but the American looked like he had something on his cheeks. Tears or dog slobber?

“How dangerous is this man?”

“To others or to himself?”

The question did not surprise the sniper. She was more than half-convinced the marks on Ledger’s cheeks were not there because of his dog.

“As a fighter and field agent,” she said.

“According to psych profiles and all other available data, Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger should be considered a Class-A threat.”

The sniper found that very interesting.

There was movement. Ledger abruptly straightened and looked at the closed door against which he sat. Then he and the dog climbed quickly to their feet. Ledger reached inside his jacket but after a moment brought his hand away without a gun. It was clear that someone had just knocked on the door, and it seemed apparent from Ledger’s body language that the visitor was expected.

But who was it?

Rasouli?

Another of St. Germaine’s agents? The Sabbatarians?

Or one of those unholy bastards in the Red Order?

“Oracle. Stand by.”

“Standing by.”

As Ledger reached for the door handle, the sniper leaned her shoulder against the stock of the rifle. Her slender finger stroked the cold metal rim of the trigger guard.

Chapter Fifteen

When the delivery man knocked on the door I nearly jumped out of my skin. I leapt to my feet and spun toward the door. Ghost gave a low growl and took up a defensive stance next to me. He was too tactful to mention that I spent five seconds scrabbling inside my jacket for a pistol I wasn’t carrying.

I peered through the peephole and saw a teenage boy in a kufi.

Before he could knock again, I opened the door and he handed me a package, accepted a tip, and departed without saying a word. He threw some cautious looks at Ghost, though, as if aware that this was a ferocious mankiller for whom a packet of goat strips would not assuage a savage hunger. Ghost apparently had the same thought and glared at his retreating back until I closed the door and told him to knock it off.

Inside the package was a carton of Bistoon cigarettes, which I threw out. The other items in the paper sack were the battery and a cell-phone charger wrapped together with a blue rubber band.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and slid the battery into the phone and was delighted to see that it was already charged. I should have given the kid a bigger tip.

Our DMS phones have a USB port, and I fished out the flash drive and plugged it in. It did not look particularly damaged from the outside, but then again the outside was plastic. I was more than a little surprised-or maybe “suspicious” is the appropriate word-that Rasouli gave me the original rather than a copy. I was glad he did, though, because once I uploaded what I could I was going to find a way to get the flash drive into a diplomatic pouch for an expedited trip across the ocean. Once Bug got his sweaty little hands on it I was sure the drive would yield up everything there was to find.

Could Rasouli have had that in mind? Did he know about MindReader? Sure he did, he knew Vox.

My gut turned over. Every time I thought I had a grasp on how much damage-past, current, and potential-that could be laid at Vox’s feet, something came along to broaden my perspective. MindReader was an ultrasecret system and part of its strength lay in the fact that the bad guys didn’t know about it, or if they did they didn’t know what it could do. Vox did. That meant that anyone he told, every government or terrorist organization, would be scrambling now to upgrade their computer-security protocols. Common knowledge of MindReader’s intrusion properties could easily create a new spike in security technology for computers. Grace Courtland once told me that the whole Chinese GhostNet program was their response to rumors that something like MindReader existed. And Vox himself had clearly financed some big-ticket research because he had provided the Seven Kings with the only cellular phone system that MindReader couldn’t trace or crack. Bug, the DMS computer hotshot, said that designing such a system could not have been done by accident, it had to have been created specifically to thwart our computer.

I plugged the flash drive into the USB port on my phone and immediately got a bunch of read-error messages. The thing had been in someone’s stomach, so that was no surprise. However, I went through the steps to do a forced upload of bulk data and soon images were whipping across the screen too fast for me to see. Damaged or not, there was a lot of stuff on the drive. The upload failed twice and I had to repeat the steps, but eventually I got the UPLOAD COMPLETE message.

I scrolled back through the contents at a slower speed until I found a series of JPEGs, one of which was the picture Rasouli had showed me. It looked so innocent, so nondescript in its metal case. And though I know that machines have no personality, I could not help but ascribe the word “evil” to it, as if the malign intent of its creators had been somehow transferred to the device during its construction.

I took a breath, engaged the code scrambler, and punched a speed dial. The phone rang three times.

“Go,” was all Church said, which is more than he usually gives when he answers a phone.

“Boss, I have a Firehall One situation.”

“Is there a finger on a trigger?” His voice sounded as calm as if I asked him who pitched for the Orioles last night.

“Unknown. But… from the vibe I got from my source I’d say this is something coming at us rather than already here.”

“Tell me.”

“I just uploaded the contents of a flash drive to the server. It’s damaged goods. It’s filed under my name and coded for you, eyes only.”

I could hear him tapping keys on his laptop as I spoke.

“Okay, I have the data. Where did this originate? Who’s your source?”

“You’re going to love this,” I said, and told him everything. He did not interrupt once, and I hoped that he was alone because this was going to really test his Vulcan calm.

After a short pause, Church asked, “Were you able to verify his connection to Vox? Could Rasouli have simply thrown the name at you to win your trust?”

“I don’t think so. Vox told him to tell me that he vetted Grace and she was clean. He said ‘She wasn’t one of mine.’”

There was a longer pause. “Interesting.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“Rasouli made no move to arrest you?”

“Just the opposite,” I said. “Rasouli teased me by saying that one of the devices might be in the U.S. He couldn’t have been more vague if he’d spoken in code, though.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“I’m not sure I’d believe him if he said the desert was made out of sand. But…”

“Where are you?”

“My hotel room.”

“Bug might be able to salvage more of the damaged files. I’ll reroute a local asset to pick up the flash drive. Wait for his call.”

“I don’t think I should leave the country while-”

“You’re not. You’ll be taken to a safe house you can use as a staging area. We’ll evaluate the situation so be prepared to go after that device in Iran. I’ll have Echo Team rendezvous with you there.”

“Speaking of my team… did everyone make it out okay?”

“Everyone but you. Safe and sound and over the border.”

“Outstanding. What about the packages?”

“The three young people are with their families. They’ll go to London for a thorough physical, and we’ll have them home in forty-eight hours.”

“Not seeing anything in the news.”

“Iran hasn’t acknowledged the incident. There’s some question here about how they’ll play it. Fifty-fifty split between them producing dead soldiers and claiming that we launched an illegal attack that resulted in casualties; or they reach out to us on the sly and agree to a public statement that they worked with us to insure the safe release of suspected spies who have since been cleared. My money is on the latter. State is prepping a variety of responses,” he said.

“Be nice to have the good guys win. Those three kids were pretty tough. They didn’t break, and we both know the Iranians didn’t go light on them.”

“Admirable,” Church agreed, and that was about as sentimental and weepy as he ever gets. “What do you need, Captain?”

“I’m equipment-light. I need weapons and gear. Can your asset drop that stuff off?”

“I can arrange weapons, but he won’t have a field kit. Echo Team will bring the party favors. And I’ll have Bug send you the latest disarming protocols.”

“Once last thing, Boss,” I said. “Do you think this is the return of the Seven Kings?”

“Impossible to say at this juncture,” he said. The line went dead.

In my best impersonation of Church I said, “Why, thank you, Captain Ledger, damn fine work.” Ghost gave me a look and went back to his dried goat.

I studied the picture of the bomb. Jesus. Someone wanted to nuke the entire Mideast oil fields.

Understand, I gave just about half a warm shit about the whole oil wars thing. I cared even less about the politics of it. But there were hundreds of millions of people in the region. I thought of all the people coming and going in the cafe. Their families, their kids. All of them. Working, eating, sleeping, loving, and living on top of four, maybe six, nuclear bombs. Maybe more.

I stood up, swayed for a moment, then ran like hell into the bathroom, dropped to my knees in front of the toilet and vomited. It was so immediate and desperate that I could hear myself screaming as I threw up.

My stomach spasmed on empty and I dropped the lid with a bang. Ghost was in the doorway, barking at me, scared and nervous. I pulled some toilet paper off the roll and wiped my mouth.

“It’s okay,” I gasped, reaching out with a trembling hand toward Ghost. He gave my knuckles a nervous lick. “It’s okay.”

I flushed the paper and used the sink to pull myself upright. I ran the water on cold and stuck my face down into the spray. I rinsed out my mouth and tried to spit out the taste of terror.

The shakes hit me then and I had to ball my hands into fists as I walked into the bedroom. You can only play it like Mr. Cool for so long before the realities of emotion and brain chemistry show up to kick your ass and prove to you that you’re just as human as everyone else. Maybe Mr. Church has a lock on invulnerability, but I haven’t cracked the code yet. I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried not to cry.

In the movies, Bruce Willis doesn’t cry. He’s a stoic. He’s also working off a script that he knows has a happy ending. I wasn’t. What if it came down to me to stop these things? Me and what I can do pitted against the potential loss of life that numbered several hundred million. I’m one guy. A year ago I was just a cop.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, and I could hear the raw horror in my own voice.

Chapter Sixteen

Mr. Church typed his personal code into his laptop and brought up the Rasouli files. He scanned the index and then began viewing the files one by one. His face was relaxed, composed, without expression, as data, charts, diagrams, lists, and photographs came and went, came and went on his laptop screen.

The room was still except for music playing softly. “Smokin’ At The Half Note” by Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery. The current track was Tadd Dameron’s “If You Could See Me Now.” Mr. Church appreciated the simple intensity of Wes Montgomery’s guitar work on the track, and he let it play through before he did anything.

Mr. Church selected a vanilla wafer from a plate, tapped crumbs off of it, and took a small bite. He munched quietly for several seconds. He was a large man, broad-shouldered, strong and blocky. It was generally believed by those who knew him that he was north of sixty, but people agreed that age did not seem to touch him. The gray in his hair was the only real mark; and the scars on his face and hands suggested that his years, no matter how many they were, had not been idle.

His eyes were half-closed behind the tinted lenses of his glasses as he looked inward, assessing what Ledger had told him, working through the implications of the information on Rasouli’s flash drive. If anyone had been in the room they would have thought he was a man lost in the subtleties of a piece of classic jazz. There was no outward sign of agitation.

A slender cell phone sat on the desk blotter next to his laptop. The image on the laptop’s screen was the one Joe Ledger had sent via e-mail. When the song ended, Mr. Church picked up his cell and opened it, punched a number, entered a code that engaged a 128-bit scrambler, and waited for the other party to answer. After three rings, a man’s voice said, “Hello?”

Mr. Church said, “Mr. President, we have a situation.”

Chapter Seventeen

The fat American sat uneasily on the edge of a metal chair that was draped with red velvet. He was not accustomed to being uneasy. For most of his life it was other people who were uneasy around him. The other man-if “man” could accurately describe the pale figure who sat opposite him-was not like other people. The American doubted this creature feared anything.

Their chairs were identical, ponderous wrought-iron monstrosities looted centuries ago from a desecrated mosque. A single small candle in a shaded sconce cast the only light, and its pale glow was far too fragile to hold back the enormous walls of darkness that closed in on them from every side. The American could only guess at the size of the chamber in which they sat. During the long and convoluted walk down here from a hidden entrance in the city above, the American could see that it had been carved out of the living rock, and was forever filled with shadows that dripped and whispered. The black mouths of tunnels trailed off into darkness all around them. The American knew that there were guards in those tunnels-creatures equally as pale and strange as this man-but he could not see them.

He could, however, feel them. And he caught glimpses of luminous red eyes staring at him with suspicion and pernicious hunger.

The American and the pale man sat in silence for long minutes. Studying each other with the frankness of butchers.

The pale man was tall and gaunt, dressed simply in black trousers and a collarless shirt the color of old rust. No shoes on his pale feet, no jewelry on his hands, and only a crystal locket on a silver chain around his neck. Long white hair was brushed back from a narrow, ascetic face. When the American had first met him, the man looked like a starving albino, but on closer inspection there was a ferocious vitality in the thin face and long-fingered hands. A lupine, predatory quality. The American adjusted his opinion: this man was not wasted by hunger, but defined by it. Made powerful by it.

When the American had been ushered into the room he had brought with him a heavy metal briefcase which he set on the bare rock floor between them, equidistant between the chair provided for him and the three-step dais on which his host sat. The pale man regarded the case but did not ask that it be opened or inspected.

“So,” said the American, “LaRoque wasn’t bullshitting me when he described you.”

The pale man said nothing.

“I believe his exact words were,” continued the fat man, “‘the King of Thorns.’ I thought it was some kind of lurid nonsense at the time. Some bit of poetry that he was using to try and spook me. But…”

“The Scriptor,” said the pale man.

“Beg pardon?”

“You will call him ‘the Scriptor.’ We do not use his daylight name.”

“You may not, chum, but I do,” laughed the American, but his smile was fragile and fleeting. “Okay, yeah. The Scriptor. Silly damn name, though.”

“So says the ‘king of fear,’” murmured the other. “Or am I mistaken about who you are, Mr. Vox?”

Hugo Vox straightened in his chair and eyed the pale man shrewdly for a few seconds. “Yeah, okay, cards on the table. Call me Hugo. What do I call you, though? ‘King of Thorns’ is a bit clumsy for a casual chat.”

“You may call me Grigor.”

“Good. I prefer first names when I do business.” Vox pursed his lips. “If you know about me, then I guess that means you know about the Seven Kings.”

“Yes.”

“Who told you? The ‘Scriptor’?”

Grigor shook his head. “The Scriptor does not choose to come down here. He calls when he needs his Red Knights.”

The pale man’s voice was strange, heavily accented, and controlled, which made it a challenge for Vox to read inflection and subtext. Even so, he could detect an edge of contempt in Grigor’s phrasing in that last sentence. Certainly disapproval, and maybe more than that.

“So, what, he phoned in about me? Just up and broke his word to me? He told you the secret he swore on his life that he wouldn’t share with anyone?”

The pale man smiled and made a small dismissive gesture with one hand.

“No, uh-uh,” persisted Vox, “we don’t just drop that. How do you know about me?”

“It is the business of the Red Knights to know everything-”

“Yeah, cut the sales pitch. I’m not a rube and you’re not at one with the universe. This is supposed to be a very hush-hush meeting and you are not supposed to know who I am. That information was mine to share or not. The fact that you do know makes me pretty goddamn twitchy about the whole deal. My business associates-”

“Your associates are terrorists, corrupt officials, and mass murderers, Mr. Vox. Let’s not pretend they are anything else.”

“And you’re what? Kermit and the Muppet Babies? You really want to measure dicks to see who gets the bigger boner from screwing the public?”

Grigor looked amused. “What the Red Knights have done, and what we continue to do, has the blessing of the church.”

“Bullshit. It has the blessing of one twisted fuck of a priest who is even scarier than you and me put together, and I know for a fact that the Vatican has no clue what he’s giving his personal blessing to. If they did, they’d go Old Testament all over the Red Order, the Red Knights, and Father-frigging-Nicodemus, and you can put that in the bank.”

Grigor said nothing. He steepled his long fingers and simply stared at Vox. Around them the shadows echoed with the scuttle of rat feet and the distant weeping of women.

“Fuck it,” said Vox and stood up.

“The priest.”

Vox stared at him. “What?”

“The Scriptor did not betray your trust. It was Father Nicodemus who told me your name. It was he who told me about the Seven Kings and what you and your mother are planning. Weaponized versions of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Father Nicodemus thinks that it is a beautiful plan.”

Vox narrowed his eyes. “How does he know about that?”

“He did not say.”

“No,” muttered Vox. “He wouldn’t. Spooky bastard.”

Vox remained standing for a moment. He looked around and saw milk-white faces watching him from the tunnel mouths. The watchers seemed to be cast in black and white except for their eyes. Like the man on the dais, everyone down in the shadow kingdom had dark red eyes. Vox was only half sure that it was stage dressing designed to create exactly the reaction he was having. Naked fear.

To the pale man, Vox said, “Which means that LaRoque-excuse me, the Scriptor — probably knows, too.”

“The Scriptor and the priest do not have secrets from one another. That is one of the pillars on which the Ordo Ruber was built.”

The Red Order. Vox did not speak the translation aloud, but he knew what it was. LaRoque’s grandfather had told him the whole story decades ago. That sharing had been a betrayal of the strict rules of the Red Order, and knowledge of it was supposed to be a death sentence for anyone not initiated into their ancient brotherhood.

“Okay,” he said, “then let’s both lay cards on the table. You know who and what I am? Fine. Turns out, I know who, and much more importantly, what you are.”

The pale man looked skeptical. “Then who and what am I?”

Vox smiled thinly as he spoke a single word. “Upier.”

He heard gasps and angry mutters from the surrounding shadows. Grigor’s eyes widened briefly and then narrowed to dangerous slits.

Vox held up a hand. “If you’re planning on giving me one of those ‘men have died for less’ speeches, save it for the tourists. We got off on a bad foot here. I’m appropriately skeeved out by you and your troops down here, so you can put that in your win category. Still-to make this completely fair, I think you should be a little more afraid of me.”

Grigor smiled at that. “The Scriptor said that you were brash, but he neglected to tell me that you were a fool.”

“The Scriptor is a paranoid schizophrenic and a fucking moron who couldn’t find his own dick with both hands and a set of printed instructions,” said Vox. “And just so you don’t think I’m blowing smoke up your ass, take a look at what I brought.”

He nodded to the briefcase. Grigor stared down at it with sudden suspicion, his pale lips parting slightly, but he made no move toward the case. Vox nodded approvingly.

“We both know what’s supposed to be in the case,” said Vox. “Contact info for every arms dealer on three continents, and some of my untraceable cell phones. But, since I’m not hideously stupid, the contact information is on a password-protected laptop and the cell phones can’t be activated without a special access code.”

Grigor’s eyes narrowed to lethal slits. “You did not bring them?”

“No,” said Vox, “I did not bring them down here to your deep, dark ultrascary secret lair. Like I said, I’m not stupid. What I brought instead, is a bomb.”

He removed his right hand from his pocket and raised it to show the small black plastic device he held.

“Yup. Detonator. The case also has two pounds of C-4 in it. Probably won’t kill everyone down here, but it’ll turn both of us into clouds of pink mist and bring down a hundred tons of rubble on the rest.

Grigor’s pale face went whiter still and he took an involuntary step backward, forking the sign of the Evil Eye at Vox and barking out a few sharp words in a language Vox could not recognize.

“Okay,” said Vox in a hushed tone that did not carry beyond the small circle of lamplight in which they stood. “Now we know whose dick is bigger. Let’s cut right to the chase. You think I came down here as a gofer for the Scriptor. Pretty apparent now that it isn’t the case. Though the Scriptor thinks it is. He thinks I’m kindly old friend of the family. I can’t begin to tell you how fucked up LaRoque is. He has no insight into people at all. He’s known me his whole life, knows about the Seven Kings, and still thinks I’m just some guy he can send on errands.”

He took a step forward. Grigor tensed, clearly debating whether to attack or run, but Vox showed him the trigger. A red light glowed beneath the arm of the detonator. “Dead man’s switch. I die, you die. Stop thinking bad thoughts and let’s see if we can talk serious business.”

To his credit, and to Vox’s appreciation, Grigor’s body gradually relaxed and he held his ground. Still on the dais, a king of death looming above the king of fear.

“Why have you come here, then?” asked Grigor. “What do you want?”

“I’m here because you need me.”

Grigor smiled, revealing his unnatural teeth. “What I need from you I could take.”

Vox shivered despite himself. “Christ, don’t do that, you big freak. I’m trying to talk business here.”

The candlelight glimmered on the wicked points of Grigor’s fangs. Vox licked his lips. It felt like the cavern floor was tilting under him. The moment was as terrifying as it was surreal, but he stood his ground even as sweat poured down his face and stung his eyes.

Finally, Grigor allowed his smile to fade and the fangs slowly vanished. He sat back in his chair. “Then talk business.”

Vox let out a tremendous sigh. “Jesus H. Christ,” he growled. “You really groove on your own mystique, don’t you? Shit.” He used his free hand to mop his forehead with a handkerchief, and despite the fact that every nerve he possessed screamed at him to run, he took a step closer to the foot of the dais. Grigor arched an eyebrow in surprise, or perhaps in appreciation for the nerve that such an action displayed. Vox said, “Since you know about the Kings, then it’s only fair that I tell you that I know everything about the Red Order, and I do mean everything.”

He watched Grigor’s eyes, saw them jump in surprise, and saw how Grigor looked quickly away to hide his reaction.

“That is between you and the Scriptor,” said the pale man.

“No it isn’t,” replied Vox, and Grigor’s eyes settled once more on him. “When I say that I know everything about the Order, that means everything. That means I know about the Upierczi.”

Grigor leaned forward. “And what is it that you think you know?”

“I know why you really want the names of all the arms dealers… and it’s not to buy guns, no matter what LaRoque says.”

“No.”

“What’s a gun to someone like you? Maybe twenty years ago, maybe before you guys got your ‘upgrade.’ Yeah, don’t look so surprised, Grigor. I told you I know all about you. I know how strong you’ve become. I don’t think Charles LaRoque has a fucking clue.”

Grigor did not correct him this time.

Vox took another step. “I know that despite being called a ‘knight,’ the Red Order thinks of you as a slave. They treat you like slaves. You are slaves.”

In a pale and dangerous whisper Grigor said, “What else do you know?”

“I know that your slavery is about to come to an end. You want to break the chains. You want to stage a slave revolt that will make Spartacus and the gladiator rebellion look like a frat party.” Vox smiled. “Don’t you?”

Grigor’s eyes burned with red flame. “Yes.”

“And,” said Hugo Vox, “I want to make sure that happens. That… and so much more.”

Chapter Eighteen

Jerome Williams-“Bug” to everyone-sat amid a web of computer terminals, screens, coaxial cables, encoding buffers, and other equipment, and all of it inside a big glass box. Two inches of reinforced glass and a sophisticated multiform entry scanner separated him from the fifty other people in the sprawling Tactical Operations Center. The TOC was a monument to computer-driven sophistication, and rising like an obelisk was the primary processing tower of MindReader. That, too, was safe behind the bulletproof glass and guarded by two unsmiling soldiers with M4s.

Bug glanced up from his keyboard at the flow of people in the TOC. Some were hunched over workstations connected through monitored sockets to MindReader’s servers; others spoke on phones or milled like frenzied insects, going about the thousand crucial tasks related to the current crisis.

Despite the constant flow of cool air into his fishbowl, Bug was sweating heavily. Six rogue nukes. Just the thought of those weapons hidden out there terrified him. Violence was such an alien concept to him, despite where and for whom he worked. Most of the time it was an abstraction, a crazy concept no more real than the aliens, monsters, orcs, and zombies he battled in video games. He knew that the problems the DMS faced were real, but they weren’t real to him. He had never heard a shot fired in anger, never saw the enemy anywhere but on a computer screen. It was easy to stay detached if you lived like that.

Bug was a small man. Thin, spare, slightly hunched from a life spent at the keyboard. His work for the DMS was usually pure support. Crack a code, break through an anti-intrusion firewall, steal some guarded information. Fun stuff. Even when providing real-time intel for the field teams there wasn’t much actual pressure on him. After all, MindReader was the fastest computer on the planet. The basement of the hangar had a cold room lined wall to wall with a supercomputer cluster. The primary computer block was made up of three thousand premarket upgrades of the Tianhe-1A system which flew at a speed of 2.507 petaflops. That was more than thirty percent faster than the Cray XT5 Jaguar. Sometimes Bug would sit with his palms flat on the MindReader obelisk and feel the power surging through him. That was real to him.

But today… the real world seemed to have found a way past all of his personal anti-intrusion systems. Fear was like an unbearably shrill sound in his ears.

“Find those other devices.” That’s what Mr. Church had said to him before the Big Man went in for his conference with the president. Not “try” to find them. Find them.

It was on him.

Him.

He closed his eyes and breathed in long and deep through his nose. The air in the fishbowl was ripe with the hot-wire smell of ozone. A beautiful smell.

“Come on, baby,” he said aloud as his fingers hovered above the keyboard. “Come on, my baby. Don’t make me do this alone. Talk to me…”

Almost as if in answer to his plea, a bell softly pinged.

Chapter Nineteen

The bedside phone began ringing at precisely the wrong moment. Circe O’Tree was naked, covered in sweat, painted by candlelight, and on the verge of screaming as she moved in a frenzied pace up and down. Her black curls danced above her bouncing breasts as the rhythm drove her up and up and up toward the crest of climax. Beneath her, drenched and straining and grimacing with the beginnings of his own orgasm, Rudy Sanchez growled out her name over and over again.

The phone kept ringing.

They ignored it. They were only aware of it on some distant level, their immediate need transforming the intrusive sound into a mere component in the symphony of sounds and sensations. The music from the speakers, the sounds from the street outside of Circe’s window, the creak of the bedsprings, the urgent slap of flesh against flesh, and their marathon panting breathing were all parts of something much greater.

“Oh, God!” cried Circe as the orgasm reared above her like a dark wave of velvet beauty, and she screamed incoherently as he came too. Together they spun to the edge of the precipice and plunged over, crying out each other’s names, saying meaningless words, making sounds provoked by sensations that were beyond even the most precise articulation.

The phone rang through to voice mail.

Circe collapsed onto Rudy, showering his face with many small, quick kisses as beads of crystalline sweat dripped from every point of her onto his skin. He gathered her in his arms and kissed the hot hollow of her throat and her cheeks and her eyes and finally her lips.

The phone began ringing again.

They ignored it.

It rang five times and stopped.

Circe could feel Rudy’s heart beating as insistently as hers. She clung to him, her body wrapped around his.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“Te quiero,” he murmured.

Then his cell phone began ringing.

They both glanced at it.

“Let it go,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed. They did not move as it rang through to voice mail.

There was silence. Circle let herself fall off of him in delicious slow motion, his arms around her to catch her fall and keep her close. Rudy looked at her. Lean and yet ripe, tanned skin a shade lighter than olive, and eyes that held more mysteries than he could count. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever touched; the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Movie-star beauty coupled with a fierce intellect and a personality as complexly faceted as a diamond. He took a strand of her hair and held it to his nose. It smelled of incense and wood smoke and sex. He wanted to tell her all of this, but in more poetic terms, and he fished for words that would convey what he felt without sounding like lines cribbed from old movies.

“I-” Rudy began, and then her house phone started ringing.

And her cell.

And his cell.

All at the same time.

“Damn,” Circe said.

Rudy cursed quietly in Spanish as he stretched an arm over and picked up both cell phones. Circe took hers and answered first.

“Dr. O’Tree.”

“Where are you?” asked Mr. Church.

She closed her eyes and mouthed the word “Dad.”

Rudy looked at the screen display on his. It said TIA. Aunt. Aunt Sallie.

He nodded to her.

“I’m home,” she said.

“How quickly can you get to the Warehouse?”

“Why? I’m off this week. I have to do revisions on the chapter on-”

“That can wait.”

“But it’s important.”

“Not as important as this,” said Mr. Church.

Circe sighed and considered smashing the phone against the wall.

Then Mr. Church said, “Bring Dr. Sanchez with you.”

Before she could ask a single question, he disconnected.

All of the phones went silent.

“What?” asked Rudy, and Circe told him. Then she buried her head against his chest.

“I hate this,” she growled. “I hate that he can just pick up a phone and ruin a perfect moment for me.”

“I expect,” said Rudy, “that he hates it too.”

She looked at him for a moment, reading his eyes. She sighed again and nodded. “Damn it.”

Five minutes later they were in Rudy’s Lexus breaking speed laws all the way to the Warehouse.

Chapter Twenty

Top Sims sat on the edge of the open door of a stealth helicopter. The helo was a model Top had never seen or heard of before last night-a Nightbird 319, a prototype variation on the OH-6 Loach used by the CIA during Vietnam but updated with twenty-first-century noise reduction technology, better construction materials, and radar-shedding panels that made the craft look like it was coated in dragon scales. The Nightbird had skimmed a few yards above the sand as it crossed the Iranian border, flying well below radar and inside the bank of total darkness provided by the rocky landscape. Almost totally silent beyond two hundred feet, it used special rotor blades that thrummed out a much softer vibration signature than that used by regular helicopters. If the pilot had not sent Top a locator signal, the two cars would had driven right past them in the night.

Echo Team abandoned the cars and crammed themselves and the rescued college students into the chopper, but then they had to endure a terrible two minutes of waiting and praying as a phalanx of Iranian Shahed 285 attack helicopters came sweeping across the star field above. Top was very familiar with those birds. Each Shahed was rigged with autocanons, machine guns, guided missiles, antiarmor missiles, air-to-air and air-to-sea missiles. Seriously badass, and Iranian helo pilots were no fools.

However, the helicopters swept past and then split into two groups, heading north and south along the border, their surveillance systems looking right through the bird on the ground.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” breathed Bunny. The three former hostages were panting like dogs. Khalid was murmuring prayers in Egyptian.

Top felt every one of his very long, very hard years settle over him as he exhaled a deep breath and closed his eyes.

“We’re clear,” said the pilot over the intercom. The rotors spun up to a higher whine-though still eerily quiet-and the Nightbird lifted off. “Next stop Kuwait. First round’s on me.”

That was ten hours ago.

Now the three freed American college students were with their families. Laughing and weeping, hugging each other, kissing their families and each other. A happy ending and for once no one had died. Despite his weariness, it made Top feel like there was some clean air to breathe in the world.

Bunny sat nearby on an overturned milk crate, sipping Coke from a can. Khalid was throwing grapes into the air and catching them in his mouth. Lydia, who had found her own way out of Iran, had her boots off and her feet in a bucket of cool water.

The three of them looked like they were at a picnic, but Top wasn’t fooled. He knew every trick in the book about the “fake it till you make it” approach to regaining personal calm. All of them were feeling it. Anyone who ran this kind of game or played in this league felt it; but all of the nerves, the fears, the existential doubts were wrapped tight in affectation and shoved out of sight of the rest of the world.

To let it show would be to admit openly that they were human, and they couldn’t do that. Not on the job. Not in front of people. Not when there was another mission ahead, and another after that.

Top ached for the cigarettes he’d given up fifteen years ago. Or maybe a nice cigar. That would give his hands something to do, and concentrating on the smoke rolling down into the lungs and then swirling out again was something orderly and controllable. Even if the cigarettes were killing you, the process of lighting, inhaling, holding, exhaling, watching the smoke, shaping it with lips and tongue as it flowed out, and tapping the ash-all of that was deliberate process. Process was part and parcel with calm. But he didn’t have a smoke and promised his ex-wife that he would never start again. So, instead he chewed a piece of gum very slowly and precisely, and he grinned at the hikers and their families.

It was Bunny who finally spoke, starting the process of talking about it. “Smith should be here pretty soon.”

Top nodded. Smith had called from a border post right before climbing into a jeep with a Kuwaiti sergeant. “Any time now.”

A few seconds blew by on the hot wind.

“You think the Cap’s okay?” Bunny asked.

Khalid caught two grapes in his mouth, bobbing and weaving like a boxer to get under each of them. “Cowboy’s always okay.”

“Uh-huh,” agreed Top. It was a lie, though. Their captain spent as much time being stitched and splinted as the rest of the team put together. And they all knew that he was half crazy. Maybe more than half crazy. No one had the details, but rumors had leaked out in DMS circles that Captain Ledger had a party going on in his head. Not that it mattered to them. As far as Top was concerned, the captain could have the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Ave Maria” in his head and it didn’t change a thing. Ledger was their captain and their friend, and they’d follow him into hell. Top thought about that and smiled ruefully. They had followed him into hell.

His earbud buzzed and he tapped it. “Go for Sergeant Rock.”

“Sit rep,” said Mr. Church crisply.

“Sir, all quiet on the western front. Waiting on Chatterbox and Cowboy.”

“Give me a status report on combat readiness,” interrupted Church.

Top winced and almost cursed aloud. He was bone weary, and he ached for a hot bath, a cold beer, and twenty hours of sleep. Preferably with someone curvy, brown, and warm snuggled up against him.

“Always ready to rock and roll, sir,” he said with energy in his voice that was a total fabrication. “What’s the op?”

Khalid and Bunny shot him looks that went from inquisitive to surprised to murderous in the space of a second. Top spread his hands in a “what can I tell you” gesture.

Bunny bowed his head and sighed. “Oh, man…”

“We are at Firehall One,” said Church. That rocked Top and slapped all the fatigue from his nerves. Firehall was DMS combat code for a nuclear threat.

“Jesus…”

“Acknowledge,” snapped Mr. Church.

Top stiffened and the others caught the sudden jerk of his body. They clustered around him.

“Acknowledge Firehall One, sir,” said Top, and the others exchanged stunned looks. “Echo Team is ready to respond.”

“Then listen closely,” said Church. “Time is critical…”

Chapter Twenty-One

The King of Thorns rose from his chair and loomed above Hugo Vox. In the dense shadows pale figures crept closer, surrounding Vox with burning red eyes and hungry mouths.

Vox turned in a slow circle, looking at the twisted figures. Some were vastly old, with crooked bodies and crippled limbs; some had the blank moon faces of deeply inbred retardation; but seeded throughout the crowd were creatures like Grigor. Taller, whole, and powerful, their skin the color of milk, their eyes blazing with intelligence and an unnatural vitality that seemed to burn into Vox, threatening to steal away his life and breath.

Vox held up the detonator. “Careful now,” he murmured in a ghost of a voice. “Let’s all be very, very careful.”

“I am not afraid of your bomb,” sneered Grigor. “The Upierczi do not fear death.”

That annoyed Vox and he snapped, “Don’t lie to me, Grigor. Not to me. Everyone fears death. Even monsters like you. And… monsters like me. I’m not here to bring death and you damn well know it. I brought the bomb because I need to speak openly with you. No coy bullshit. We don’t know each other enough for trust, so shared fear is a good platform. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Grigor ran his tongue over the serrated ridge of his teeth.

“Talk,” he said.

Vox took another step, which brought him to within reach of Grigor, but the pale man remained motionless, his eyes glittering.

“The Scriptor and the Red Order don’t give a shit about you unless they need you to do their dirty work,” said Vox. “To do the work they are too weak and too afraid to do themselves. Isn’t it time to stop being their dog?”

Grigor’s eyes seemed to blaze with real heat. “Yes.” He hissed the word, filling it with endless hatred and cold fire.

“Yes,” agreed Vox.

“I know what happened to you. I know that eight hundred years ago Sir Guy LaRoque, the first Scriptor, sought out the Upierczi because the Order had a need for killers. Not any killers, but the best. Better than the Hashashin the Tariqa were using for their part of the so-called Holy Agreement. Nicodemus told LaRoque where to look, and he found an Upier in England, in Newburgh. He found another in France, and more in Italy, Poland, Russia… all through Europe. Not a community of you. Individuals. Hunted, wretched, hungry. Persecuted by the church. Condemned as monsters, as demons, as the unholy. LaRoque brought the Upier back to Nicodemus, and the priest created the Order of the Red Knights. Must have sounded pretty great at the time. To those poor, miserable fucks who had been hiding out in crypts and forests and ruins-to them it must have felt like they were people. Like they mattered. And, I guess they did matter; but only in the way a bullet matters if you want to shoot a gun. That’s what the Upierczi were, no matter what fancy-ass labels the Red Order hand out. Tools, weapons, slaves. For you guys, all three words mean the same thing.”

Grigor gave a single, slow nod.

“But the Order hit a snag with you. Something Sir Guy and Nicodemus didn’t foresee. You guys can’t breed worth shit. There are no female Upierczi, which screws things up from the jump. You guys are genetic freaks, a sideline of human evolution that didn’t pan out. The genes that make you what you are rarely present in females, and when they are the females look human and they sure as hell don’t want to breed with you. Not by choice. That meant that the Red Order had to start a forced breeding program. How many women did they take over all those years? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? More? And every one of them had to be forced. Eight hundred years of rape isn’t a legacy to be proud of.”

Grigor sneered. “They are women. Who cares?”

Vox smiled. “Yeah, I’m the last person to throw stones. Anyway, the breeding program hit some of its own snags. Turns out only one in fifty or a hundred women was able to give birth to a healthy Upier. Most of the babies were-how should I put it? Less than successful? Stillbirths, freaks. Once in a while one of the breeding slaves popped out a half-breed. Always female, though, right? Whaddya call ’em? Dhampyr?”

“Abominations!” The word rippled through the darkness, spoken by a hundred mouths.

“Glass houses, stones. Any of that ring a bell?” asked Vox, amused. To Grigor he said, “The real bitch of it all was that the Red Order focused their breeding program on those few women who could produce Upierczi. They bred them and their children, over and over again, which left a pretty shallow fucking gene pool.” He gestured to one of the Upierczi who had mongoloid features and a vacuous expression in his eyes. “Inbreeding didn’t work for the Hapsburgs, and it sure as hell didn’t work for you.”

“That is the past,” growled Grigor.

“I know,” said Vox, smiling broadly. “I know that really goddamn well, which is why I’m here. Charlie LaRoque’s dad, who was probably one of the better Scriptors, as far as that goes, decided to try something different. Genetics. Gene therapy, gene splicing. Not rebreeding but a careful and deliberate remodeling of the Upier DNA. Very smart, very expensive, and very illegal. Which is how I found out about it, because if it involves science and it’s against the law, I’m always involved, I’m always making a buck on it, and I always find out about it.”

“What is it to you? What is any of this to you? You have the Seven Kings. You are their King of Fear. You are more powerful than most of the governments in the world above.”

Vox reached up, threaded his fingers through his hair, and revealed a bald pate that was blotched and unhealthy.

“I’m a walking dead man,” he said. “Cancer. I’m done. Best-case scenario gives me eighteen months.”

Grigor’s eyes glittered like rubies.

“Nobody knows. Not the Kings, not my mother. Not the Scriptor. Nobody.”

“Why come to me? Do you want a quicker death?”

“No… I want to live. You see, the other thing that I know about is what the scientists discovered while they were engineering the new generation of Upierczi. They cracked your DNA. They found out why you never get sick, why you lucky pricks live for so damn long. They know what makes you as close to immortal as living flesh and bone is ever going to get.”

Vox took a last step closer to Grigor, well within reach.

“I know about the treatment. I know about Upier 531,” he said fiercely. “And I fucking want it.”

“It isn’t for your kind. It would kill you.”

“It might kill me,” corrected Vox. “Or it might make me live forever.”

Grigor laughed. Low and soft. If a wolf could laugh, Vox thought, it would sound like that.

“Why should I give it to you? What could you possibly give me in return?”

“I can give you the whole fucking world, Grigor. I can make sure that no one and nothing can put you in chains again. I can guarantee it.”

“Prove it,” demanded Grigor.

He and Vox stared at each other for a long minute, their faces less than a yard apart.

Vox raised the detonator between them. He turned it over and slid back a small panel on the bottom, revealing a nine-digit touch pad. Vox showed this to Grigor and then slowly and deliberately punched in a complex code. The LED light glowing under his thumb faded to black. Hugo Vox raised his hand, palm out, offering the inert detonator to Grigor.

“All hail the King of Thorns,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Knowing that Church was working on finding the nukes was a tremendous relief. Even I don’t have a sense of all the forces he can bring to bear at need. His connections and his political clout are considerable, and he doesn’t allow red tape to slow him down. With Vox in the mix? Well, let’s just say that I pity anyone who got in his way today.

Having handed off the ball, I switched my focus to the second part of Rasouli’s message. The Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex. I had no idea what they were and I did not believe for a moment that they were entirely tangential to the nuclear issue. Rasouli had been a little too casual about mentioning them.

I called Bug. He wasn’t good with computers-he was a freak. When 9/11 happened Bug was still in high school, amusing himself by hacking into the school board computer to give everyone he liked a 4.0 average and to put the school disciplinarian on a sex offenders watch list. A couple of years after the planes hit, Bug tried to hack Homeland, believing that if he had access to their data he could find Bin Laden. The next day Grace Courtland and Sergeant Gus Dietrich-Church’s personal bodyguard-showed up at his front door to offer him a choice: jail or a job with the DMS. Bug made the smart choice.

Since then he’d become the high priest in the church of MindReader. And back in 2011 he got his wish by helping track Bin Laden to his Pakistani compound.

He answered the call with: “Hey, whaddya know, Joe? Heard about the hikers gig. Echo Team kicks a-a-a-a-ass.”

“Thanks, Bug, but listen up. Something else is about to hit the fan. The Big Man will be calling you any minute about-”

“I know, the nukes. I’m looking at it right now. Frigging scary as shit, huh?” Bug said with the kind of excitement you hear from video gamers who have found a challenging new level. I sometimes wonder if Bug knew that he didn’t exist in a purely virtual world.

“So you’re already tied up?”

“Nah, this stuff is crap. Got to run it through a bunch of filters and a clean-up program before we can do much with it. That’s going to take a couple of-”

“Good. Then, before you get swamped with that I need you to start a database search for me. It’s part of the nuke thing; but it’s a different arm of the investigation and to tell you the truth I don’t have a clue how it relates. All I have are the names of two books. No authors, no other data.”

“Fire away.”

“The Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex.”

“Saladin, as in the sultan who-?”

“Presumably. Rasouli dropped his name during our little chitchat, so I figure that was some kind of hint.”

“Okay. Wait-there’s something about them on the drive. No… forget it. Stuff’s corrupted as all shit. Reads like some kind of gibberish. I’ll have to see if I can translate it. What do you need?”

“Anything you got. General and specific. I had to dump my tactical computer and PDA, so send it to me via e-mail so I can read it on my phone. You ring any serious bells, call me directly. If I don’t answer, hit scramble and leave it on my voice mail.”

“You got it, Joe.”

I disconnected, and again I could feel another layer of stress crack and fall away.

Ghost came over and leaned against me. He does that. I know it’s more of a greyhound trait and the fuzzmonster is pure White Shepherd, but Ghost isn’t one to pass up a trick that might get him petted. I ran my fingers through his fur.

“I don’t suppose you know how to sniff out a nuclear bomb, do you?” I asked him. “No? Guess I’d better do it.”

He wagged his tail to show that he believed me to be Captain Invincible who could find those pesky nukes and crush them in my hands of steel. That or he thought I had more goat strips in my pocket.

I debated taking a shower and maybe drowning myself. Might be a tension breaker.

Instead I called Rudy Sanchez.

“Cowboy!” he said instead of hello. “Are you home?”

“I wish. Where are you?” I could hear wind rushing past the phone.

“On the way to the Warehouse. Mr. Church called ten minutes ago and told us to come in right away. Can you tell me what’s happening?”

We were both on scrambled phones, so I gave him the highlights.

“ Dios mio! ”

“No kidding.”

“How are you doing with all of this?”

His question, I knew, had very little to do with the mission and a lot to do with my overall mental health. Rudy and I have a lot of history. When I was a teenager my girlfriend Helen and I were jumped by a gang of older teens. The guys completely trashed me, breaking bones, rupturing some stuff inside. While I lay there coughing up blood they took turns with Helen. That image is seared onto the front of my mind. I see it every single day.

Helen and I healed from the physical trauma. I got involved in martial arts and made myself as tough and as ruthless as I could. Helen wandered down a few dark corridors inside her head and never found her way out.

We met Rudy during his psychiatric residency at Sinai in Baltimore. Helen was having one of her frequent breakdowns and Rudy did some amazing work with her, pulling her back from the brink time after time. He also helped me work on my internal wiring. Unfortunately the darkness was too much for Helen, and one day she let it take her.

I kicked in her door and found her.

Her death nearly killed me. Nearly killed Rudy, too. He’d never lost a patient to suicide before. We were already best friends, and that friendship probably saved us both. Since then we’ve become closer than brothers-certainly closer than I am to my own brother. Rudy is the only person in whom I place total trust.

He’s also the person who helped me make sense of the wreckage in my head. As I healed, I began to realize that I was not completely alone inside my mind. Over time three distinct personalities emerged. One was the Civilized Man, and Rudy says that he is my idealized self, the version of me that I wish could survive in this world. Optimistic, compassionate, nonviolent; and he’s been taking a real beating over the last couple of years as I hunt bad guys for Mr. Church. Then there is his complete opposite, the Warrior. Or, as I sometimes think of him, the Killer. He’s the part of me that was born on that day when the children that Helen and I had been were destroyed. He is ruthless, highly dangerous, and unrelenting. His bloodlust is intense and constant, and although he can be glutted, his hunger will eventually come back. I have to keep a real eye on him, especially while working for the DMS, because the more evil I see in the world the harder it is to rationalize putting him in a cage.

The third personality is the one that I believe truly defines me. The Cop. He’s not a cynic or a wide-eyed idealist. He’s rational, cool, calculating, and balanced. He emerged even before I joined the police; in a lot of ways he has a Samurai vibe. Skilled, but self-controlled.

They’re always with me, and Rudy taught me how to manage them. How to make them more fully a part of a whole rather than disparate entities. I’m not entirely convinced I’ve managed that.

I trust Rudy’s judgment, though. In that and in most things. When I got my gold shield with Baltimore PD, my father-then the commissioner-arranged a consultant’s position for Rudy, which later expanded into a full-time gig. Rudy specialized in trauma cases, which is something he really dug into after Helen’s death. He was in New York after the towers fell, working with survivors and families and with the legion of heroes who risked their lives to search through the rubble. He was in New Orleans and Mississippi following Katrina, in Thailand after the tsunami, in Haiti, and in Japan. He knows that he can’t save everyone, and every lost soul gouges a deep mark into his own soul, but he saves more of them than anyone else.

When Mr. Church hijacked me into the DMS, Rudy became part of the deal. I often think that he does a lot more good with quiet conversations and a patient ear than I do with a pistol. Which is very much as it should be.

“I’m okay,” I said. Rudy grunted, knowing that I was lying. He’d let me get away with that as long as I was in the field, but once I got back home I’d have to fess up. I’d need to by then.

“Joe-Mr. Church called me late last night and told me about the hikers.”

“Yeah.”

“That was well done,” he said. “That one will really matter.”

“All part of the job.”

“No,” he said, but left it there. Knowing Church, he would probably have Rudy sit down with the hikers.

“Why’d Church call you in on this?” I asked.

“I think he wanted Circe more than me. This is her field more than mine.”

“Not if the nukes go off,” I said.

“Mother of God.”

“Speaking of Circe-how’s she doing?”

Dr. Circe O’Tree was a PhD in a handful of overlapping subjects including Middle Eastern history and religions, cults, anthropology, psychology, and a few others I’m probably forgetting. She has more letters after her name than anyone I’ve ever met. She was also Mr. Church’s daughter, a fact that was shared by only a few people and that I’d only found out by accident. Although Circe now worked for the DMS, she and her father had been estranged for years. I was under very specific orders from Church not to mention the family connection. To anyone. Ever. He didn’t actually come out and threaten to disappear me, but I didn’t want to push the issue.

“She’s wonderful,” said Rudy.

I smiled. I’ve never seen Rudy happier. Even though I hadn’t yet heard him throw around the L-word, whenever he looked at Circe there were little red hearts floating all around him.

“Tell the missus I said ‘hi.’”

“Cowboy,” he warned, but I laughed at him. Laughing felt good. It felt like I was still in the real world.

My phone pinged softly. Someone else was trying to reach me.

“Hey, Rude… I have another call coming in. I’ll talk to you soon.”

I disconnected and looked at the screen. No caller ID. Church said he would have Abdul, our local asset, call me, so I punched the button.

“Hello,” I said in Persian.

“I see you got a new battery for your phone,” she said in English. “Sorry I made you throw out the last one.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

It was her. Same voice, same hint of an Italian accent. A bit more pronounced now. I fought the urge to check my body for laser sights. There were none, but I moved out of the line of sight of the hotel window.

“What is it now?” I asked. “You want to set me up for a playdate with Satan?”

She laughed. At least someone thought I was funny. “No,” she said, “you said you wanted to meet me.”

“I do.” I tried not to sound too eager. I used my thumbnail to slide back a panel on the side of my phone. I pressed a button that activates a trace. “Name a place. I’ll buy the coffee.”

“Sorry… it will have to be over the phone. I want to ask a question.”

I almost laughed. “Why on earth would I want to answer one? Last time we chatted, you put a laser sight on my balls.”

“I could have shot your balls off. I did not. You can check if you like. I’ll wait.”

“Okay,” I said, “admittedly you get some Brownie points for not blowing my balls off. Thanks bunches, but it’s hardly a basis for enduring trust.”

“‘Brownie points’? You are a strange man, Captain Ledger.”

“You have no idea.”

“Maybe I do.”

Before I could respond to that she came at me out of left field. “What did Rasouli give you?”

“What makes you think he gave me anything?”

“He said he wanted to give you something.”

“Okay, there’s that. He’s your boss, why don’t you ask him?”

She made a gagging noise. “God! I would rather shoot myself than work for such a cockroach.”

“Didn’t look that way an hour ago.”

“Eh,” she said dismissively. “It was contract work. Believe me, Captain Ledger, it is all I would ever be willing to do for him.” With her accent she pronounced my last name as “La-jeer.” I liked it. Made me feel exotic and mysterious.

“Even so,” I said, “why not ask him?”

“He doesn’t know me. I’m a voice on a phone to him. Why would he trust me?”

“Why would I?”

“I am asking very nicely,” she said.

Despite everything, I laughed. She did too. “I’ll think about it.”

“I promise not to shoot you.”

“Yeah, that earns you those brownie points, but so far you’re only a sexy voice on a phone line. You don’t have enough points to buy much more than civility.”

There was a short silence as she considered this. I looked at the display on the side of my phone. The trace was about halfway completed.

“Maybe I can earn some extra ‘brownie’ points,” she said.

“How?”

Instead of answering she asked, “Can I call you ‘Joe’?”

I smiled and shook my head in exasperation. Ghost looked at me in disgust. He would have hung up a long time ago, I suppose. “Only if I have something to call you.”

“You have to know that’s impossible.”

“Then give me anything. A nickname.”

“I have a thousand names.”

“Yes, that’s very ‘international woman of mystery’ of you, but I only need one.”

After a few seconds she said, “Violin.”

“Violin,” I said, testing the name. “That’s pretty.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll bet you are, too.”

“No,” she said, “I’m a monster.” And in those four simple words her tone changed from playful humor to something else. She packed that word with such intense sadness that I was momentarily left speechless. Before I could fumble out a reply the line went dead.

I stared at the phone. The LED tracer went from green to red. Trace incomplete.

“Okay,” I said aloud. “That was surreal.”

Ghost stared at me with huge doggie eyes. Sadly he offered no wise insights into what the hell was going on.

Chapter Twenty-Four

They walked through the shadows, two incongruous figures that did not look like they belonged in the same century let alone the same reality. Vox found it very amusing even while it was frightening. He admitted to himself that Grigor scared him. In Vox’s estimation, Grigor-with his pale skin, black clothes, and otherworldly demeanor-would scare anyone. He wondered how much of it was window dressing to sell the idea of immortal monsters, and how much of it was the real deal. Not knowing the difference is what made the fear sweat run icy lines down Vox’s back.

After all, Grigor was in many ways the real deal. He was one of Upierczi, the reigning king of his kind. Ancient by any ordinary standard and, if the stories the Scriptor’s father had told him were true, faster and more powerful than any of his followers-and they were faster and stronger than…

Than what? He asked himself. Than humans?

As they walked, Vox pondered that question and his fear grew and grew.

Grigor led him through a maze of tunnels, some of which looked to be centuries old. Some of the tunnels opened into well-organized living quarters, with proper lights, rooms like dormitories, niches for worship, mess halls, and many rooms for training. There were cells down there, too, and as they walked past, Vox could hear the wretched whimpering of female voices.

He paused. “What’s that?”

Grigor turned and regarded the line of cells with heavy-lidded eyes. “Breeding pens.”

“Who are those women?”

“They are not women,” sneered Grigor. “They are cows. If they are lucky, if God favors them, they will bear a Upierczi son.”

“If they don’t?”

“Then they are less than useless to us.”

He spat on the floor and turned to continue down the long corridor.

Vox lingered for a moment. One voice, a very young voice, suddenly screamed with the absolute and immediate horror of someone who was being brutally used and who knew, with absolute certainty, that no one would ever come to rescue her. It made Vox feel sick. He tried to tell himself that it was the chemo upsetting his stomach. If it accomplished nothing else, the lie at least kept him from vomiting.

He hurried to catch up to Grigor.

After another quarter mile, Vox stopped again, this time to peer at a piece of broken mosaic on a cracked wall. When Grigor saw him staring at it, the pale man said, “That is Darius the Great being crowned. It was placed there on the first anniversary of the Persian king’s death. This wall was made four hundred and eighty-five years before the birth of Jesus Christ.”

Vox turned and looked at the open mouths of tunnels and side corridors. “These tunnels are that old?”

“Some are,” agreed Grigor. “Some are older still; and we have tunnels like these in many cities.”

“You dug these holes?’

“The Upierczi did much of it, but your kind made many of them,” murmured Grigor, still caressing the stonework. His eyelids drifted shut. “Do you know how the Upierczi came to be the slaves of the Ordo Ruber?”

“I… know the version I was told by the Scriptor’s grandfather. About Sir Guy going looking for… your kind.”

Grigor leaned his cheek against the stone wall. “Father Nicodemus sent Sir Guy out to find Upierczi anywhere he could. In Turkey and Russia, England and Romania. Many places. There were rumors of us, of course, and most rumors were false. They said that we were the corpses of the dead risen from graves to haunt and prey upon the living.” He laughed and then shook his head. “We were not a race then. We were an aberration, an abomination. Freaks who were born to live in shadows, always hungry, always on the point of starvation, driven to mad acts of violence merely to survive. It is no different with any creature God has made-in the direst moment need overwhelms control.”

“That hasn’t changed,” said Vox.

Grigor nodded. “Your people feared us, and that is to be understood. The Church, however, denounced us as demons, as children of Satan. Knights and warrior priests and anyone who could raise a sword on behalf of the Church were empowered to kill us, to hunt us to extinction.” He sighed. “Think of that life. To be alone, and to believe that there is no one like you. No one who shares your nature, no one who understands your hungers. No one who loves you.”

“Love?” said Vox quietly. “They make a lot about that in movies. Dracula and Twilight and all that shit. I don’t suppose you get to the multiplex very often, but that’s a kind of a theme out there. They think you are all about eternal love and romance. But I heard those women in the cells. Didn’t sound like love songs to me.”

Grigor turned away and looked deep into the shadows, and Vox wondered how much the man could see that he could not. Without immediately commenting on Vox’s statement, Grigor continued his story.

“When Sir Guy died, his son and successor, along with Father Nicodemus, created the Red Knights. A new order of chivalry, of knights errant given authority by the Church to prosecute a campaign against faithlessness. But that was in name only. They called us knights, and we call ourselves knights, but that is not who and what we are.”

“Then what are you?”

“Assassins. We were created to be the Order’s answer to the Tariqa’s fida’i. We were chess pieces. We were a sword, a knife, a gun. No different. Tools of war.”

“You’re more than that,” said Vox.

“Yes,” said Grigor and it was the first word he’d spoken that had real passion. “We made true knights of ourselves. We became in fact what they said we were in name only. We became a true order of chivalry. We became a society. A people.”

“You still live in tunnels, Grigor.”

“Because we choose to. It is our world, within but apart from the world above. We have thousands of miles of tunnels. We come and go and no one knows we are here. Archaeologists and miners sometimes find the tunnels, but we collapse connecting tunnels, and we are experts at disguising our private tunnels. We are not found unless we choose to be found.”

“That’s pretty fucking impressive.”

Grigor gave a half smile. “It’s necessary. We know that we could never integrate into the world above. We can play dress up and ‘pass’ for one of you, but not on close inspection. And we are still hunted up there. The Inquisition was created by a papal bull to hunt us down. Us and other things that move in the dark, most of who are only fantasies concocted by fools. Father Nicodemus was able to use some aspects of the Inquisition so that he and the sitting Scriptor could find true Upierczi. Find and recruit us; but to the Church at large we were monsters and therefore evil; and they still hunt us. We do not fear any man in single combat, or any two or three men. But the Inquisitors did not come at us in small numbers. They sent armies against us. They sent special teams-the Sabbatarians, the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulcher, and many others over the years. Some-most-of those groups are long gone. Died out or killed by us or disbanded by changes in Church policies. Only the Inquisitors remain, and after a long silence they’ve become active again.”

“Yeah,” said Vox, “I know about one of them. The Sabbatarians. The Seven Kings ran into them a couple of times. I even used them once in a while for some wetworks stuff, but I broke off my ties with them. Idealistic trash. They’re still around, though, and they’re formidable in numbers.”

“In the same way locusts are.”

“There are a lot of them,” said Vox, and Grigor nodded.

“Over the years we-with the help of Father Nicodemus-have managed to weaken their effectiveness by feeding them lies about who and what we are. About our strengths and weaknesses.”

“Disinformation,” Vox supplied. “Stakes, crosses, sunlight, that sort of shit?”

“Yes.”

“Nicodemus is a tricky bastard. What about garlic?”

Grigor did not answer.

Vox said, “I heard a rumor that some other group is gunning for you too. Arklight?”

Grigor hissed like a snake. “Whores and daughters of whores.”

“Maybe,” said Vox grudgingly. “Whores with high-powered sniper rifles, though.

With a black-nailed finger, Grigor pointed into the darkness in the direction of the wretched weeping. “They were our whores once. There is not one of them who has not screamed for us.”

“Charming,” murmured Vox. A wave of nausea swept through him and he stopped to steady himself on a wall. “When do we start the treatments? I’m losing a lot of ground here.”

The King of Thorns smiled.

“The treatment will make you scream,” he murmured.

“Then I’ll fucking scream,” snarled Vox.

The word “scream” echoed through the endless darkness.

A challenge. A promise.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The sniper’s name was not Violin.

But it would do. For Joseph Ledger and for this crisis, it would do. The name meant something to her from a long time ago. Back when she meant something to herself. When she had a life instead of a mission.

Violin.

Even the sound of it in her mind was bittersweet. A memory of a girl who laughed freely and who thought that all the monsters in the world were in storybooks. Back before her eyes were opened.

Violin. She had liked the way Ledger had repeated it. He had truly tasted the name, the way a sensualist would. That intrigued her. She already knew that he was a passionate man, that was clear from the profiles Oracle had read to her. Ledger was a sensuous man, and a tragic one. He wore death and grief like garments.

And Violin understood that very well.

What she did not understand was why she had lingered to watch him, or worse yet, why she had called him. It felt correct while she was dialing, and yet in every way open to her analytical mind it was wrong. A tactical and strategic error and a clear break with Arklight protocol. Mother would be furious.

No, she corrected herself, Mother will be furious. The call was now part of her phone log, which meant that it was part of the mission file. Lilith would never overlook it.

“Oracle,” she said aloud.

The screen on her small computer lit up with its smiling Mona Lisa.

“Oracle welcomes you.”

“I want to enter a new code name.”

“Voice recognition is active. What code name would you like to enter?”

“Violin.”

“Is this for file or field use?”

“Field use. It will be my call sign for this mission. Enable.”

“May I inquire as to why you have changed your code name? Has your cover been compromised?”

“My cover is intact. The change is to… maintain high security standards.”

“Thank you. Call sign ‘Violin’ is enabled. All appropriate field teams will receive a coded memo. How may I help you, Violin?”

“I need to speak to my mother. Right now.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Hugo Vox sat in his car and wept.

He had never felt pain like this before. Not during chemo or radiation. Not even the cancer hurt this bad. Upier 531 was a lot more than gene therapy. Vox knew about gene therapy and it didn’t hurt beyond the simple injections.

He felt like every cell in his body was tearing itself apart.

The car was soundproof, so his screams bounced off the windows and the leather seats and smashed into him like fists. He punched the steering wheel and dashboard.

Tears ran down his face.

“God!” he begged. “Please, God…”

But God had never once answered his prayers, even when Vox still believed.

Vox felt his mind fracture, felt pieces fall away. A fever burned through him and his skin was as hot as if he sat in a furnace. The sweat ran down so heavily that he felt like he was melting.

What had he done?

How could he have thought that this was going to save him, because now he was sure it was killing him.

Not only gene therapy.

Grigor’s pet mad scientist, Dr. Hasbrouck, had given him three injections of something else. Three syringes with long needles. Syringes filled with fluid the color of blood.

No, not just the color of blood.

Upier 531.

Blood of the damned. Blood of the monsters who tunneled like pale moles in the bowels of the earth.

Blood of vampires.

Hasbrouck had strapped Vox down for those injections. Bound his wrists and legs and chest. And then he had raised one gleaming syringe above him. A bead of blood gleamed on the needlepoint.

“This may hurt a little,” Hasbrouck had said with a sadistic chuckle. And then he had plunged the needle into his chest.

Into his heart.

Vox had screamed. Oh, how he had screamed.

The pain was so far beyond his understanding that he had no adjectives to describe it. He felt the alien blood as it entered him.

It shrieked its way into his heart, into his blood, throughout his body.

Vox did not pass out until the second needle. Hasbrouck, courteous man that he was, splashed cold water in Vox’s face before he gave him the third injection.

“You really should pay attention to this,” said the doctor. “It’s not every day that someone makes you immortal. Have a little respect.”

The third needle was the worst of all, because every inch of Vox’s skin tried to recoil from it. Like a torture victim who knows that his last inch of unburned flesh is next to feel the Inquisitor’s touch.

Vox passed out again.

And woke up behind the wheel in his own car.

The pain came and went. Discovering that he was still alive was little comfort. He put his face in his hands and sobbed.

A voice said, “Stop it. You embarrass me.”

Vox’s head shot up and he jerked sideways in his seat. A scream bubbled inside his throat, but it died on his tongue.

“How the fuck did you get in here?”

Father Nicodemus smiled. “What does it matter?”

Vox stared in mingled horror, doubt, and fascination at the old priest. It had been years since he’d seen him, but the cleric had not changed at all. Not a line, not a day.

“No, I guess not. But damn you’re a spooky bastard. And, besides, I thought you said it was too dangerous for us to meet like this,” Vox said, turning to glance through the tinted windows.

“No,” said Nicodemus, “that isn’t what I told you. I said it was dangerous for us to meet.” He smiled. “Not at all the same thing.”

A wave of agony swept over Vox and he recoiled from it as from a blow, shutting his eyes, hissing through clenched teeth. Through the haze of agony he heard Nicodemus speaking.

“Do you feel it?”

“Yes, I feel it, goddamn it. It fucking hurts!”

“No. Don’t be a child, Hugo. Look through the pain. Look into its heart, see it for what it is.”

Vox was panting like a dog, each breath a labor.

“Deep inside the pain something wonderful is happening.”

“What?” gritted Vox.

The priest bent close and whispered to Vox, “You are becoming one of them.”

Them.

“Please…” he begged.