Assassin's Code

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Department of Military Sciences maintained eleven active field offices within the continental United States. The Baltimore field office was the seventh office to be established, and it occupied a warehouse once used by a terrorist cell to prepare for the launch of a global pandemic. Mr. Church had repurposed it and outfitted it with the very latest in anti- and counterterrorism technologies. A staff of one hundred and sixty-three people worked at the Warehouse, including two full field teams, Alpha and Echo.

The TOC-Tactical Operations Center-was not as grand as the one at the main headquarters in the Hangar at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, but to Rudy Sanchez it was dazzling. The TOC was the heart of the Warehouse, a command center filled with computers and control consoles whose purpose Rudy could only guess at. He was a medical doctor and psychiatrist, but his knowledge of advanced tactical computer systems was nil. He was fine with that. Standing and watching as the technicians and officers worked gave him a chance to observe the staff under a variety of stressful conditions, and that was useful for him in his job as chief psychologist for the DMS.

At the moment, he stood with his finger hooked through the handle of a cup of coffee, watching as Circe O’Tree settled herself into the computer array that was restricted for her private use. The computers formed a three-quarter circle around a leather swivel chair, and there were plasma and holographic screens at various levels. Rudy appreciated the science fiction appearance because he knew two things about it. The first was that the presence of the most cutting-edge technology made Circe-and the other senior staff-feel powerful. They had virtually limitless research materials at their fingertips, all of it backed by the MindReader computer system. It shotgunned confidence into people like Circe. And that was the second thing Rudy knew about it: Mr. Church always provided the most sophisticated and exclusive equipment for that very reason. It was not the only reason he did that, but it was definitely there. A trait of a man who manipulated everyone around him in order to coax from them the highest possible levels of confidence, personal power, and mission excellence.

Rudy sipped his coffee. The coffee was first rate too. Everything here was, and that was part of Church’s method. Treat everyone with the highest respect, provide them with things of quality, and demonstrably respect their opinions. The result was that the DMS staff tended to operate at a level of efficiency that was statistically freakish. Rudy felt it in himself, and he knew that Joe did too. Joe’s track record of amazing field work owed as much to Church as it did to Joe’s own exceptional nature.

He leaned a hip against the curved row of computers that surrounded Circe and watched her work. She logged on to the server and went through several levels of security in order to log into the MindReader network.

“I’m in,” she announced and then patted the chair next to hers. “Have a seat. This might take some time… but don’t touch anything.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Rudy with a smile as he slid into the companion chair. He cupped his hands around his mug-which had the olive-drab Echo Team logo on it-and watched as Circe filled the screens with lists of data.

“What is all that?” asked Rudy.

“The materials from Joe’s flash drive.” She peered at it for a while, frowning and occasionally shaking her head. “Lot of junk here.”

“Joe said that the agent swallowed it. Stomach acids and all that…”

But Circe said nothing. She chewed her lower lip as her eyes flicked over the information, and all the time her fingers were busy on the keys.

Weapons of mass destruction and the people who chose to use them were the core of her field of study, and that field had roots buried in history, religion, folklore, literature, psychology, and other fields. It was her particular genius that she could see connections between those disparate disciplines and then collate them into a cohesive profile. She worked in silence with an expression of ferocious interest on her lovely face.

Rudy studied it too, though much of the information was highly technical data on nuclear devices. Aside from that, he was not a field agent and despite the months he’d been with the DMS, he had yet to become inured to such words as “nukes” being thrown around as if they were a normal part of everyday life. It hurt him that this was a part of his life, and more so that it was part of the lives of the people he cared about.

Then suddenly everything seemed to jolt to a stop. While Circe was opening a file filled with random surveillance photos, one image hit them both like punches to the heart.

A big man, dressed in expensive clothes, stood with his head bowed in conversation with a smaller and much younger man. The image was labeled “Hugo Vox and unknown companion.”

Vox.

“God,” murmured Circe in a small, hurt voice.

Rudy reached out to take Circe’s hand.

“No,” she said. “I’m okay.”

It was a lie, though, and they both knew it. Rudy knew it better than anyone. Whenever Vox’s name came up, Circe’s lovely face took on a haggard look, like a prisoner who had been too long away from sunlight and clean air. Aside from the damage Vox and the Seven Kings had done to the world, and the betrayal of Church, he had also been like an uncle to Circe. She had worked for him at his counterterrorism training facility, Terror Town, for years. It was Vox, rather than her own estranged father, to whom Circe went with personal and career problems. Rudy knew that the hurt and betrayal she felt would take years to heal, if it ever did.

Circe pounded the arms of her chair. “Goddamn it, Rudy! It’s not fair.”

“I know, querida. We all feel betrayed.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “You most of all.”

“Me and Dad.” She said this very quietly so that no one else in the TOC could hear. Even so, it made Rudy feel odd.

Dad.

Even now, after months of being a part of Circe’s life, Rudy still had a hard time connecting the austere and mysterious Mr. Church with anyone’s father. Let alone a “Dad.” Joe privately referred to Church as Daddy Darth, a phrase that would assuredly not play well with the man himself.

Circe sniffed and wiped a tear from the corner of one eye. Rudy picked up her hand and kissed it.

“I hate like all fuck to intrude on this chick-flick moment.”

They looked up to see a woman’s face smiling sourly at them from one of the holographic screens. Middle-aged, black, wearing chunky designer jewelry and a Caribbean-print dashiki. Her dreadlocks were threaded with gray, and she wore granny glasses perched on her blunt nose. When she spoke, however, her accent was pure Brooklyn. Aunt Sallie, Mr. Church’s second in command.

“Don’t fret, Tia,” soothed Rudy, “you know my heart belongs only to you.”

“Nice try,” said Aunt Sallie, “but flattery won’t get you a threesome.”

“A- hem, ” growled Circe softly.

Laughing, Aunt Sallie said, “Okay, kids, let’s have first impressions. Did you find anything?”

“This information is recovered from a damaged flash drive, right?” asked Circe. “This is everything?”

“Yes,” agreed Aunt Sallie.

“Do we have the actual drive in hand?”

“Ledger’s sending it.”

“And we’re absolutely sure this flash drive is genuine?”

“We’re not sure of anything.” Aunt Sallie’s eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking, girl?”

“I hesitate to use the word ‘bullshit,’ but-”

“But it fits?” finished Auntie.

Circe’s eyes were hard. “Yes.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Violin nibbled a callus on her thumb while she waited for her mother to call. Oracle had forwarded her urgent request, but Lilith was always handling urgent requests. Especially now that the Red Order was so aggressively active here in Tehran. The mosque bombing, the assassinations… so many things impacted Arklight.

When her phone rang Violin jumped and dropped her cell but she darted out a hand and caught it before it struck the floor. Bad nerves, good reflexes, she thought as she punched the button. Story of my life.

“Hello, Mother.”

“I was in an important meeting, girl,” growled Lilith. “There had better be a good reason.”

No hello, no inquiry about her safety. Another part of the story of her life.

“I know you probably haven’t had time to read my field report,” began Violin, “but the mission was scrubbed.”

“By you?”

“By the client.” Violin waited for a reply, got none, so she took a breath and plunged in. “You were correct, Mother, Rasouli was looking to hire an independent hitter, but we were wrong about the target. Rasouli wasn’t gunning for Charles LaRoque.”

“Who was the target?”

“President Ahmadinejad.”

“ What? ”

“It wasn’t a kill. He wanted a near miss. Something to scare him and shake things up.”

Iran was involved in a very discreet internal war between Ahmadinejad and Rasouli. In public they were friends, happy and smiling for the press, always shaking hands, clearly men with a shared agenda. In truth Ahmadinejad was losing favor and losing ground and was trying to repair his position by removing key political opponents. A near assassination might wipe the smug smile off of Ahmadinejad’s face, and do so publicly. If the president showed fear-and there would be hundreds of press cameras to record every expression that crossed his face-the perceived weakness would greatly strengthen Rasouli’s position.

Lilith grunted. “What do you infer from that?”

Her mother was not asking for advice or an opinion; this was a test. It was always like that with her.

“There are two clear possibilities,” said Violin, who had been preparing her answer since Rasouli contacted her. “Both possibilities are tied to Rasouli’s political aspirations and to the offer made to him by LaRoque.”

“Tell me.”

“The first is that Rasouli is going to accept the position of Murshid and sign the Holy Agreement with LaRoque and the Red Order. Ordering a hit on Ahmadinejad would be a demonstration of his commitment. Also, he’s been very vocal in denouncing the mosque bombing and the spate of assassinations. By now he must know that the Red Order is behind all of that, and yet he hasn’t said anything. That in itself could be a message to LaRoque and the Order that he can keep their secrets.”

“And the other possibility?”

“If Rasouli is not going to sign the Agreement, then it’s likely he was going to use the bungled assassination attempt to begin the process of exposing the Red Order to the world. He would need to do this in a big way-so big, in fact, that LaRoque would not dare to have him killed. Exposing the Order could be orchestrated into a rallying cry to unite all of Islam against the West. Pretty easily, too. It would emasculate European power in the Middle East, and by association irreparably damage the United States. And it would give religion itself a shot in the arm if Rasouli exposed who and moreover what the Red Knights are. The Catholic Church, the Upierczi, the Inquisition… that could spark a true jihad that would put Catholicism and probably all Christians in the crosshairs. Islam has never been truly unified against the west, but this could do just that.”

Lilith made a small sound that might have held an ounce of approval. “Which scenario do you think is most likely?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Violin, though she hated to show uncertainty. “The first serves Rasouli directly, and his profile paints him as severely ambitious. The second would make him a hero of Islam, and although that would give him more power, it would tie him more securely to the ayatollahs. Rasouli would be a hero of the faith, and he’d have to live that role. His psych profile, however, suggests that his personal faith is more political than actual. He’s never a fundamentalist unless the cameras are rolling.” She took a breath. “We need more information before we can decide how he’s playing this.”

“Yes.”

“We do have some new information that might give us a fresh perspective,” continued Violin. “When Rasouli scrubbed the hit on Ahmadinejad, he offered me a bonus to provide security for a meeting with an American agent.”

She told her mother about the meeting in the coffee shop and about trailing Captain Ledger to his hotel.

Lilith was silent for a while and Violin could almost hear the wheels turning. It had taken Arklight seventeen months of careful work to get the right credentials in place for Violin’s team of shooters to be considered “first choice” for quiet political hits. It meant actually doing some hits, though luckily none of them had been saints. Far from it.

“I… ran a search with Oracle on Ledger,” ventured Violin. “In case he was a traitor or a suspected agent of the Red Order.”

“And-?”

“He works for St. Germaine.”

She heard a sound that sounded like a gasp; but that was impossible. Mother was far too controlled, too cold, to have such a human reaction.

“Mother-?” she prompted gently.

“Follow Ledger,” barked Lilith. “Find out what Rasouli gave him and what he knows. I don’t care how you do it, you find out.”

Before Violin could say another word the line went dead.

Violin stared at the device for several seconds, totally confused by her mother’s reaction. She set the phone down as gingerly as if it were a sleeping scorpion. Then she bent to her sniper scope and studied Joseph Ledger with intensified interest.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Why is it bullshit?” demanded Aunt Sallie.

“Let’s conference in Bug,” said Circe, and a moment later the bespectacled young man was peering at them from a screen next to the one showing Aunt Sallie.

“Here’s the problem,” began Circe. “I’ve done extensive work on damaged and partial documents. If you look at the history of recovered writings, from cartouches on Egyptian stelae, the Dead Sea scrolls, to things like this flash drive, the information gaps are random. They’re determined by chance, by exposure to elements, and other factors.”

Bug nodded agreement, and Rudy could tell that he was already on the same page as Circe.

Auntie peered over her glasses. “That’s not what you’re seeing here? So what am I missing?”

“It’s the inventory,” answered Circe. “We have two clear JPEGS of nuclear devices and several other ‘damaged’ image files. That gives us the type of device and establishes that they are already in place. We have field notes from an operative with a Geiger counter. Not a tape or digital recording of the counter, but personal observation notes that look like they were transferred from a phone text message. We have a list of targets, which is naturally compelling but also weirdly precise, considering that Rasouli has no verifiable ‘source’ for any of this. There’s more, but that’s my first impression.”

“Wow,” said Rudy. “You got all that by looking at this for twenty minutes? You always impress me, my dear.”

“No,” interrupted Circe, “that’s just it, this is too fast. Too easy. It’s like we’re being handed too much too soon.” Again, Bug was nodding along with everything she said.

Rudy frowned. “Isn’t that was Rasouli was trying to do?”

“Yes,” conceded Circe, “and I might have been less suspicious if the drive was intact. What troubles me is the fact that the drive was damaged and yet there are a lot of very key pieces here.”

“Exactamundo,” agreed Bug.

“It doesn’t make sense, though” Circe said, then quickly corrected herself. “No-it does make sense, but only if the person placing those files on the drive knew that the drive would be damaged.”

“Yup.”

“No, that’s wrong, too,” murmured Aunt Sallie. “Damage from moisture is random. Does this mean that the files were added after the flash drive was removed during the autopsy?”

“I don’t think so,” said Bug. “In fact I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.”

Rudy asked, “Admittedly I don’t know what I’m talking about, so forgive me if this is a foolish question, but… we can’t actually be certain that the drive was really swallowed by Rasouli’s agent, can we? So, could the moisture damage have been deliberate?”

Bug grinned so hard his face looked ready to explode. “Bingo!”

“Okay, boy genius,” said Aunt Sallie, “tell us.”

“I could do it,” said Bug. “In fact I’m really, really, really sure that someone else who is almost as smart as me did exactly that.”

“Almost as smart?”

Bug sniffed. “If I did it, no one would ever have figured it out.”

“Arrogance is a serious personality flaw,” said Rudy, but he was smiling.

“The whole package here is a little too cute,” said Bug. “Either Rasouli thinks we’re pretty dumb, which isn’t likely; or he thinks we’re really smart. I’m going with that, because layer after layer he’s giving us useful stuff, but stuff only we’d figure out. I mean, I’d buy the whole ‘this was damaged’ business if there were more bits of useless junk, but there’s hardly any of that. Almost everything we have is useful in some way.”

“Which is statistically improbable,” added Circe.

“Why the subterfuge?” mused Rudy. “If the drive was deliberately damaged, should we infer that Rasouli is double-crossing us in some way?”

“Possibly,” said Bug. “At the same time, I don’t think he knows enough. By fragmenting the data he has, it tells us a lot while at the same time possibly disguising all that he doesn’t know.”

“Why go to such lengths?” asked Rudy. “He reached out to us for our help.”

“Politics,” suggested Aunt Sallie. “He’s an ambitious little bastard. Maybe he found a way of strengthening his position within Iran, or maybe within Islam, while still removing a possible threat to his country. The less specific he is with us, the easier it could be to spin the actual outcome in his favor.”

“That’s cynical,” Rudy said.

“Hell, we do it all the time. Spin control is the second most important tool of statecraft, and probably the third most important weapon of war after big guns and strong allies.”

“It’s also devious,” added Rudy. “Very much the Hugo Vox model.”

Circe sighed. “Yes.”

“Do we trust the information?” asked Auntie. “ Can we trust it?”

“Do we have a choice?” muttered Circe.

Chapter Thirty

I kept expecting the woman to call back, but she didn’t.

Violin.

I went into the bathroom to pack my toiletries. Ghost came and sat in the doorway, watching me in case I happened to discover a beef bone in my shaving kit.

As I puttered around, I tried to make some sense of the pieces of the mystery I had, but it was like trying to assemble one picture with pieces from four different puzzles. There was the hikers thing. That’s why I was here in Iran. There was no intention or even possibility of any interaction with the Iranian government. I don’t think I had ever spoken Rasouli’s name aloud before today; until now it was only a name in news stories and in a handful of CIA field reports that crossed my desk.

Before Rasouli, there was not even a whisper of rogue nukes. I mean, sure, everyone knows about Iran’s nuclear project-which is not even a “leaked” secret. Iran was behind the first press stories. They wanted the fear of it to give them leverage. What the general public didn’t know was that their program was about eighteen months ahead of the timetable predicted in the press, and that the whole thing had been kicked off with technology sold to them, and overseen, by the Russians. The Cold War was far from over-it simply had a new mailing address.

The CIA analysts were convinced to a high degree of confidence that Iran already had nuclear bombs. Maybe ten of them. But those bombs would be much smaller than the unit in the photo. They would be tactical nukes built into warheads. It was a scary fact of political life, and it’s why the United States did absolutely nothing in direct support of the various waves of antigovernment unrest. And, it’s why they let the hikers rot for a year. If it wasn’t for the danger posed by leverage on Senator McHale, Echo Team would never have crossed the border.

So… okay, look at that. The hikers were collateral in the nukes thing; but the nuke in the picture isn’t an Iranian nuke. It was probably of Russian manufacture, in whole or part, but the Russians were sharing a sleeping bag with Iran and if Rasouli wasn’t lying, then this bomb was positioned as a threat against Iran.

“So whose nukes are they?” I asked Ghost.

He wagged his tail because that’s what dogs do. They’re too polite to interrupt.

Blowing up the Mideast oil field was a pointless act of destruction. Where was the advantage? How did that make a political statement useful to anyone involved in either the oil wars or the religious pissing contest?

And Violin? Who and what was she?

The fact that Rasouli knew Hugo Vox made all of my math fuzzy. This whole thing could be a Seven Kings beach party, in which case trying to sort through the lies to find the truth would be like trying to pick fly shit out of pepper.

I sighed. I had way too many questions and so far… not one single answer.

Ghost suddenly turned at a sound and then trotted into the other room. I didn’t hear a knock, but Mr. Church’s asset was due any minute. Maybe Ghost heard him on the stairs.

I reached for a clean shirt and was pulling it on when I suddenly heard two sounds that chilled me.

The first thing I heard was Ghost letting out a single savage bark of warning.

Then I heard a sharp yelp of pain. The sound was instantly cut off.

Chapter Thirty-One

I came out of the bathroom at a dead run and slammed into a figure in dark clothes and a hood.

We rebounded from one another, and for a weird moment I thought it was a ninja and that I was in a very bad movie. Then I saw that his clothes were ordinary black pants and a baggy shirt, and his mask was a simple balaclava.

The eyes that glared at me through the opening in the mask were weird, though. Really weird. They were a luminous red-like a white rat’s eyes-with long slitted pupils like a snake’s. Obviously contact lenses, and probably for the dual purpose of disguising his looks and trying to spook his opponent. If I was the kind of guy to stand there and gawp at him, I’d be dead.

Ghost lay twitching on the rug by the front door. Two metal flechettes were buried in his pelt and electricity coursed into him through silver wires that trailed up to a Taser the man held at arm’s length. The attacker spun and tried to pistol-whip me with the Taser.

I ducked the swing, came up fast from the crouch and smacked him over the ear with an open palm. It’s a useful blow that hurts like hell and jolts the balance, but if he was hurt, it didn’t show; and his balance didn’t suffer at all. He reacted by dropping the Taser and punching me in the ribs hard enough to lift my feet an inch off the floor. He tried to combine it with an overhand hammerblow, but I chopped it aside with my elbow. My ribs were white hot with pain, but I let that simply stoke the fury that had been burning in me since Rasouli ruined my morning. I wanted to hurt something that would scream, so I pivoted and drove at him with a flurry of precise strikes and nasty low kicks.

He matched me like we’d rehearsed this, blocking and parrying, slipping and evading every single strike; and he foot-jammed all my kicks. Then he found a hole in my attack, ducked in low and fast and drove a two-knuckle punch into my solar plexus. It missed the xiphoid by an inch as I turned away from it, but another white hot flare of pain exploded in my torso.

The punch almost dropped me. That one glancing blow was so immensely powerful that it sent me reeling halfway across the room.

That gave him a bigger hole, and he launched himself at me, snapping out with a vicious front kick that I barely evaded by turning and dropping into a three-point crouch. He landed and pivoted and his second kick was a side thrust that missed my knee by half an inch and shattered the heavy wooden leg of the desk chair. This guy was slimmer and shorter than me, but damn if he wasn’t strong.

I hooked my fingers around the slatted backrest of the chair and swept it off the floor, catching him solidly on the shoulder. The blow knocked him against the wall, but he rebounded and shattered the chair with a backward sweep of his arm. I threw an arm up to protect my eyes from the splinters; but even as I did that I did a backward kick and caught him in the stomach with my heel. I put a lot of torque in that kick and it should have knocked him out and given stomach cramps to his whole family back home.

All he did was grunt.

I mean… holy shit. A full-grown silverback gorilla couldn’t have stayed on his feet after a kick like that. My kick did exactly jack squat.

Well, not entirely true. It made him mad. And it was no fun to discover that up till now he hadn’t actually been trying to kill me. The Taser and his first selection of attacks were meant to disable. Now he was pissed, and he drove at me, stabbing at my eyes with his fingertips and trying to crush my throat with the stiffened webbing between index finger and thumb. The vicious prick fought like I did-only he was a lot stronger and a whole lot faster.

And I am really frigging fast.

So I changed the game and barreled straight at him, wrapped my arms around his thighs and picked him up to drive him right into the cheap wooden dresser which exploded into a shower of splinters, socks, and underwear. We crashed down onto the floor and I tried to slam his head into the broken base of the dresser, but he kicked up between my legs, catching me on the butt and knocked me headfirst into the wall. I got my elbow up in time to save my skull, but it left my side open and he punched straight up and caught me in the gut.

As I staggered away from that, he kicked out with both feet and sent me flying back onto the bed. He was up before I finished landing and he pounced on me. The force trampolined us off the mattress and down on the far side between the bed and wall. The attacker put a knee on my chest and cocked his fist for another of those pile-driver punches of his, but I grabbed the edge of the night table and jerked it down into the path of the punch. His fist hit the table, and for the first time he reacted. He yanked back his fist and cursed.

Not in Persian. Not in any Middle Eastern language. It sounded Italian but wasn’t, and though I couldn’t quite understand it, his words seemed strangely familiar. It was like trying to understand Portuguese when all you knew how to speak was high-school Spanish.

In the split second while he flexed his injured hand I saw a few inches of bare skin in a gap between his glove and his sleeve. There was a small tattoo, less than an inch long. It was shaped like a cross but made from a longsword standing vertical with a horizontal dagger as the guard. That image overlaid a red circle the color of a drop of blood. A word was written above it, arching over the image, but it wasn’t in English and I didn’t recognize the alphabet.

No time to ponder that now. I pulled my knees sharply up and then kicked him in the chest with both heels. He flew backward onto the bed and fell off on the other side. I scrambled up and flipped the twin mattress on top of him, then threw myself on top of it like a kid doing a cannonball into a pool.

That tore another grunt from him. Louder, filled with more pain.

I liked that effect, so I jumped up and down a few more times.

But on the third drop he shoved up on the mattress and my body landed on a slant. I fell one way and the force sent him the other way.

We got to our feet three yards apart, our backs to opposite walls. We were both panting now, though even with the pounding I’d just given him he looked fresher than I did. The bastard.

“Where is it?” he said, this time in heavily accented English. His voice was low and raspy. A mean, nasty voice.

I knew what he wanted. I figured that much out when we started this dance.

“Fuck you,” I said. Actually, what I said was “ Vaffanculo, testa di cazzo. ” Even if he was speaking some weird regional dialect of Italian I was pretty sure he’d catch my meaning.

He did, and as expected he didn’t much like it.

His red eyes flared with murderous rage and rushed me. I tried to stall him with a kick, but he swatted my foot aside, grabbed me by the shirt, and threw me across the room. I crashed into the wall hard enough to knock the cheap paintings from the wall; then I crashed down on the floor.

You see guys in movies do that-pick someone up and throw them across the room. That’s the movies. In the real world, it can’t be done. Not with someone my size. Not fifteen feet through the air so that I hit the wall at head height. It is not physically possible for a human being to do that.

My brain kept telling me that as I crashed to the floor in a heap.

I rolled onto my hands and knees and spat blood onto the floor. There was a piece of tooth there too. Fireworks exploded in my eyes and my head felt like it was cracked in forty places.

“Where is it?” he demanded again as he stalked toward me. Then he did something weird-even when added to the other weird stuff that was going on. Ghost was sprawled on the floor between us, and when the man suddenly realized that he was about to step on Ghost’s tail, he jerked his whole body sideways to avoid contact. A small, guttural cry escaped his throat as he did so. He rattled off something in that weird language, touched his heart, and drew a line with his fingers above his eyes. It had the same ritual feel as Catholics crossing themselves, though I’d never seen this gesture before. The Cop part of my mind wanted to make sense of the gesture and the man’s strange aversion to touching Ghost, but the Warrior was running the show, even though he wasn’t doing a great job of it, and that anomaly got buried under the need to survive the moment.

I tried to get up, but too many things hurt.

“What is on the flash drive the Murshid gave you?”

“The what?”

“The Tariqa,” he bellowed. “The Saracen! Where it is? Where is the flash drive?”

“I shoved it up your ass-why don’t you go look for it.”

He kicked me in the side and I barely managed to tuck my elbow against my side to save my ribs. Even so, the kick knocked me against the wall and the impact ignited more starbursts in my head.

“Who are you working for?” he said. His anger made his eyes seem to catch fire. “Are you Rasouli’s dog or are you working for that whore?”

“No,” I groaned as I fought to get to my knees, “your mother hasn’t called me.”

He tried for another kick, but I was ready and I rolled away from it and got shakily to my feet.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” he said, his voice heavy with contempt. He spat out another word, loading it with bile. “Arklight!”

I had no idea who or what that was, and now didn’t seem like a good time to ask. Running seemed like the best option, but my legs were rubbery and the room was doing a tilt-a-whirl around me.

Ski mask snarled at me. “Tell me or I will cut off your balls.”

“What the fuck is it with you guys?” I demanded. “How come every psycho in the Middle East has a grudge against my nutsack?”

I think he actually smiled, though all I could see was the crinkle around his crimson eyes. Then he rushed at me so fast that his body seemed to blur, hands reaching to grab. I tried to parry him, but he slapped my hands away, clamped his fingers around my throat and picked me up. And I mean all the way up so that I hung suspended with my feet inches from the floor.

Again, for a guy his size and a guy my size, this simply was not possible.

He bent close so that those unnatural eyes were inches from mine. His hands were as cold as ice.

“Last chance,” he sneered. “Where is the flash drive?”

“Fuck you. Where are the nukes?”

He paused for a moment, and I could see that I’d both hit a nerve and said the wrong thing.

“You know…” he breathed. Then his red eyes flared with rage that was ten times hotter than before. “Listen to me, you piece of shit-you have no idea what you are interfering with here. Give me the flash drive, tell me exactly who you’ve told, and I will end this quickly for you.”

“Or,” I choked out, “you could go piss up a rope.”

His eyes grew hotter still. “I am doing God’s work, and if you don’t tell me what I want to know I will rip your throat out and drink your life.”

Okay, I never heard that one before.

Not in real life.

I had a couple of witty comebacks for him. Stuff about his mother and livestock. But I thought that I was losing my audience. So instead I kneed him in the nuts as hard as I could. I put all of my pain and rage and fear into it. The impact canted him sharply forward, so I grabbed his head and clamped my teeth on his nose and tried my absolute best to bite it off. Blood exploded through the fabric of his mask, splashing against my face as cartilage collapsed between my teeth.

He screamed-so high and shrill that it hurt my ears. Then he started thrashing and tried to pull his head back from my teeth, but I wasn’t about to let go. I growled at him, clenched harder, and whipped my head back and forth like a dog. Hot blood gushed into my mouth.

His screams hit the ultrasonic. He flung me away from him and staggered back, pawing at his ruined face with both hands. I slammed into the wall again and dropped hard to the floorboards on knees and palms. The blood in my mouth was hot and tasted of salt. I gagged and spat it out. Part of his nose and the lower half of his mask flopped onto the floor.

Screw fair play. Screw the rules.

The man reeled and thrashed, slamming into one wall and then the other, keening in a high-pitched wail of inarticulate agony. His mask hung in dripping shreds. Most of his nose was gone. His mouth and chin were slick with dark blood.

I got shakily to my feet, sick and dazed. I figured I had him now if I could manage one more really good hit. Maybe break his neck, or crush his hyoid bone.

Then the son of a bitch wheeled toward me and hissed. His lips peeled back as he bared his teeth.

Suddenly the whole world froze and in that fragment of time I stared at his mouth.

At his teeth.

Good God.

His teeth were all filed to razor-sharp points. Like the teeth of a shark. But the canines-something was wrong with them. Really goddamn wrong. They weren’t just sharp, they were too long. Way too fucking long. Like the fangs of a dog. Or a wolf.

Or-

No. My mind refused to make that connection. It was insane and the day was already out of control.

And then the sharp-toothed, no-nose freakazoid son of a bitch pulled us right back into the real world.

He reached into a pocket and produced a gun.

Nothing weird or alien. Totally ordinary.

He had me and we both knew it.

So I let out a scream that was louder than his and I drove into him at full speed and force. It was a big, meaty impact that knocked blood from his face so hard it spattered the walls and ceiling. The gun went flying over my shoulder. Even then he tried to step out of it, but I had him and together we crashed through the glass door and all the way to the wrought-iron balcony. We hit the railing five flights above the empty street. There was glass and curtains and broken pieces of wood-framing everywhere, and even with all that we kept jabbing and punching at each other. Those jagged teeth bit the air, snapping at my face, my throat.

I shoved him back and then smashed him across the mouth with my elbow, exploding half his teeth over the rail and down into the street five stories below.

And still he fought.

Despite all of the injuries, the torn face, he spun me around and started bending me backward over the rail. I could feel my spine bending too far and too fast even while I wailed on him, smashing ribs and eyebrows and knocking more teeth out of his mouth.

Then suddenly his head jerked away from me like he’d been pulled by a rope. I heard a crack as his neck snapped, and saw a geyser of blood and brain matter splash against the shattered window frame, painting the floor and overturned mattress.

His body spun away back into the room, and he collapsed down onto the ruined bed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

I never heard the shot that killed him. But I threw myself into the room and dove behind the bed.

Had the shooter been aiming for him?

Or had they tried to shoot me and missed?

Chapter Thirty-Two

I lay there, panting like a marathon runner five feet from the finish line. Everything hurt, every inch of skin, every muscle, every nerve. I was drenched in sweat and blood, but I remained motionless, trying to hear an echo from a distant shooter.

But there was nothing. No sound except my own labored breaths.

The dead goon’s pistol lay on the box spring, but it was in direct line of sight from the window. I had no gun, no weapons in the hotel room. Why should I? After all, I was a tourist on vacation here in Tehran. All of my tactical gear was slag on the street outside the police station.

I tried to melt into the floorboards, waiting for the next shot, for the next round to punch a hole through the wall and through my body.

My attacker lay in a twisted sprawl. The shot had taken him in the left temple and the exit wound had blown most of his head off. A big damn bullet, traveling at three thousand feet per second.

I waited.

Nothing.

I waited some more.

More nothing.

Across the room, Ghost chuffed and twitched. His ribs rose and fell as he fought to swim back to consciousness.

The memory of the dead man’s teeth kept lunging out of the shadows in my mind, trying to eat away at what sanity I had left.

Gradually I decided I was waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen. The shooter was almost certainly gone by now, not after a kill. Not in a security-obsessed country like this one. The shooter was in the wind. I had to get out of this room, though. Couldn’t risk going outside yet. The basement had a nice, quiet laundry room. Good place to lay low for a few minutes at least until Ghost was able to travel.

The Warrior part of my personality was howling for blood; but the Cop part of my brain was analyzing what just happened. Or at least as much as was possible with a body that felt like it had been thrown down an elevator shaft and a head full of loud noises and thorns.

I grabbed the corner of the box spring and pulled it toward me until it tipped, sending the pistol sliding into my hand. I shoved it into my waistband at the small of my back. Then I wormed my way across the floor to the shooter. I had to risk reaching into the sniper’s line of fire to grab the guy’s foot, but I darted my hand out, clamped my fingers around his ankle and dragged him away from the window.

It was a wasted effort. I searched his pockets and got nothing. No jewelry, no scars or marks. All I got for my efforts was a better look at the tattoo, which told me nothing more than it had when I first spotted it. I pulled up his sleeve and used the camera in my cell to take a photo of it. It was written in an alphabet that was unknown to me, which was odd because I’m a student of languages. I speak a lot of them and can recognize a lot more. This wasn’t anything I’d ever seen.

The dead man’s mouth hung open and I could see his remaining front teeth. I took photos of them, too. Inside my chest my heart skipped a couple of beats. At close range those sharp shark teeth did not look like they’d been filed down. They looked like they’d grown in that way. I tried to pull one of the fangs loose, hoping that it was a fake. Some kind of combat denture. Something cosmetic. After three tries I yanked my hand back and wiped it on the rug.

I will rip your throat out and drink your life.

Hearing someone say that was bad enough, but people in my trade tend to talk all kinds of over-the-top trash. Fine. However, having someone with fangs say it is a whole different thing. You didn’t just shake that off. Even though I knew- knew — there had to be a rational explanation, no matter how exotic the science, it still hit me harder than it should have. It was so weird, so real that it awakened an atavistic dread that took me all the way back to the cave. Like I was some grunting Neanderthal huddling by a meager fire while outside strange and unnameable sounds came out of the midnight darkness.

My inner voices-Cop, Warrior, and Civilized Man-were all silent. Afraid to speak to me, unable to tell me what to do.

“Joe Ledger,” I told myself, “you have got to get the hell out of Dodge.”

I said it aloud because I needed to hear my own voice sounding nice and normal. It didn’t. I sounded scared and shaken and that didn’t help a goddamn bit.

I got to my feet and fell right down on my ass again, and the sound provoked a weak woof from Ghost. His eyes were still closed, though.

Next time I tried to get up I did it slowly. My hands were shaking and they were ice cold.

Making sure to stay away from the window, I bent and dragged Ghost out into the hall and kicked the door shut. None of the other doors on my floor opened, which was the plan. When our local contacts had picked this hotel for Echo Team they’d rented all the rooms just to leave them empty. Most of the floor below me was empty too. No witnesses, no curious faces peering out from between cracked doors. I doubt anyone knew about what had just happened except the sniper, me, and whoever sent the son of Dracula in there.

There was nothing in the room that I needed more than I needed to get gone. My cell was in my pocket, but now was not the time to make a call. Besides, I think my hands were shaking too badly even to hit speed dial.

It took Ghost another minute to wake up and two more before he could stand. As soon as he was on all fours, we crept down the back steps to the laundry room. I wanted to clean us both up and get myself together before we went looking for a safe house.

Ghost had his tail between his legs and in my way so did I.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The young man sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the pistol he had just finished loading. It was a slim, lightweight. 22. Easily concealed, simple to operate. He had used guns like this for years. He had killed with them. Men and women. Many of them.

He even knew most of their names.

The fact that he did not know all of their names was like a nail in his head. The floor around the bed was littered with crumpled up sheets of paper on which lists of names had been scribbled. On the first few sheets, the names that he could remember were written in a neat, flowing script. On the more recent ones they were scrawled in haphazard fashion. More than once the tip of his pen had gouged into the notepad, cutting fresh pages like blades on flesh.

The young man knew about that, too. He had used knives more than once.

Even a garrote.

The most recent page lay crumpled on the floor between his bare feet. Beside it lay yesterday’s bottle of Scotch. Today’s was in splinters at the base of the wall where it had been thrown.

There were other bottles too. The room was a disaster, the trash can the only place uncluttered by discards. It stood empty, like a statement, by the open refrigerator door. Inside the fridge, a week’s worth of leftovers had become worlds for new life forms, and the odor was appalling.

The young man did not care.

“Dr. Sirois!” he shouted suddenly, remembering another name. With fevered hands he began his list again. Seventy- eight names now. Seventy-eight.

He wrote them as carefully as trembling fingers would allow. As neatly as his mind would allow, but by the time he was halfway done the list even he couldn’t read most of what he’d written. He’d lost count somewhere in the forties and tore the page from the pad, crushed it in his fist, and hurled it as far as he could.

Then he screamed.

“ Seventy-eight, you sodding freak! ”

Seventy-eight was too much. He knew that. Too many deaths. Too many murders. Far too many to atone for. There was no way anyone could be forgiven for that many deaths. A saint would burn for half as many, and he knew that he was far, far from that kind of grace.

Seventy-eight. Too many.

But not enough. There were more. He could remember them. He could remember the trigger-pulls, the plunge of blades. But why couldn’t he remember their names?

He screamed again, an inarticulate plea to a God he knew would not spit on him.

When the phone rang, his screams died in the humid air of his hotel room. There was a ghost of an echo, and then silence.

Until the second ring.

The young man stared at the phone.

Not the hotel phone, which had been silent since he checked in three weeks ago.

Not at his personal cell phone, which lay smashed on the floor under the shoe he had used to destroy it.

No, this was the other cell. A bright purple one with a ruggedized rubber shell. The one he had picked up a hundred times, ready to make a call, ready to beg for forgiveness, but which he had put down each time.

The phone kept ringing.

It had not rung for weeks. Not since he had left the private villa that sat in the shade of the Kolakchal Mountain, Jamshidiyeh Park in Tehran. Not since he had been caught reading the encrypted computer files. Hacking those files had taken months. Reading them had broken his heart. Being caught reading them had resulted in a terrible fight. Shouts, hard words, and a single punch-the hardest the young man had ever thrown-that left the owner of those files dazed and bleeding on the floor. The words that man had said as the young man backed away from the horror of what he had just done-those words had opened up a fissure in his mind. They had broken something that the young man knew could not be mended.

Maybe not even by God Himself.

The purple phone kept ringing.

On the eleventh ring, he answered it. He did not speak, did not say hello, did not ask who was calling. There was only one person who could possibly have this number.

“Toys,” whispered Hugo Vox. “C’mon, kid… say something for Christ’s sake.”

Toys bent forward as quickly and sharply as if he had been punched in the stomach.

“Toys!” begged Vox. “Are you there?”

Into the phone he said, “No.”

And he disconnected the call.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Hugo Vox drew in a ragged breath and let it out through his nostrils, feeling his whole body deflate.

That single word.

No.

Vox stared at the coded cell phone on his desk. It lay beside a bottle of Scotch and a tumbler that was nearly empty. Vox snatched up the glass and drained the last of the Scotch, shivering as the ice rattled against his teeth.

He refilled the glass, drank half of it, set it down.

His sleeve was still rolled up and he looked at the injection mark, then touched the others beneath his shirt. They still hurt, but other things hurt worse.

“You miserable backstabbing little fuck,” he said aloud. The house, however, was empty. Toys had been gone a month now, and Vox knew that he would never be back. On the computer monitor in front of him was the log-in screen of the bank to which he’d wired the billion he’d given to Toys after the Seven Kings fell apart. One hundredth of the assets Vox had in over seven hundred global markets, banks, and trusts. When Toys had left him, Vox had been determined to switch all but a penny out of it. That would have made a statement, sent a message.

So far he hadn’t done it, even though he logged in to the banking site as often as six or seven times a day.

The fact that he could not yet do it irritated the shit out of him.

“You goddamn Judas,” he growled. It was far from the first time he’d said that.

What troubled Vox most was his own reaction to Toys’s betrayal. He should have been doing an Irish jig instead of sulking. Toys had found exactly what Vox had wanted him to find. Upier 531, the Upierczi, the Holy Agreement. All of it, exactly as planned. Vox still could not understand why Toys had reacted so… weirdly. This was exactly the sort of thing Toys had been involved with his whole adult life, first as Sebastian Gault’s personal assistant and since then as Vox’s protege and unofficially adopted son. This was Toys’s fucking heritage. All he had to do was join him for this last little bit of fun and the kid would have access to the other ninety-nine billion dollars.

How could anyone piss on that?

He closed his eyes and remembered the fight they’d had.

Vox had been in the kitchen at their villa, removing cardboard containers of takeout food from a cloth bag and placing them on the table. Humming to himself, happy with the way things were going with Grigor, and with that numb-nuts Charlie LaRoque. When he heard Toys open the cellar door, he looked up and smiled.

But the smile died on his lips.

“What the fuck-?”

Toys stood swaying in the doorway, his eyes red-rimmed, cheeks streaked with old and new tears. A pistol hanging limply from his hand, the barrel pointed at the floor.

“Hey, kiddo,” Vox began, “what’s-?”

Toys tossed a ring of keys onto the counter. Duplicates for the keys to Vox’s office and the cabinet with his computer files. Vox shrugged; he’d known that Toys had made dupes. There were faint smudges of wax on two of the keys from where Toys had made impressions for copying.

“So what?” he asked.

“Upier 531.”

Vox removed a container of rice from the bag. He glanced from Toys to the pistol and back again. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? What kind of question is that? You think I want to die?” demanded Vox. “You think I’d let myself rot if there was a way out?”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” said Toys. “You know it isn’t.”

“What do you think it’s about? What’s it ever about? You went into my banking records, right? You saw the deposits and the transfers. Christ, is this about the split? Are you turning on me over your share?”

“It’s not about the money.”

“The fuck it’s not about the money, you little shithead,” Vox fired back. “Okay, so I promised you a hundred billion when I died, and I’m not giving you a hundred billion ’cause I’m not fucking dying. Those injections are giving me a new shot, kiddo, and I’m fucking taking it-and I’m keeping the money I earned because now I’m going to have a chance at spending it. So, boo hoo, I’m a bad man. Are you trying to tell me you can’t live off of one billion? Are you standing there and telling me that? You wouldn’t have a fucking dime if it weren’t for me. I treated you like my own son, you ungrateful shit. I’m giving you a billion fucking dollars, though. Who else ever gave anyone that kind of cash? It’s already transferred to your account.”

“It’s not about the money,” Toys repeated, his face growing red. “It’s about where it’s coming from.”

Vox barked out a harsh laugh. “Oh, please, do not even go there.” He paused and shook his head. “Look, don’t think I don’t know that you’ve been getting all moody and guilty lately. Ever since Gault died you’ve been watching way too many televangelists. It’s creepy and it’s silly, but I figured if it works for you, then who am I to tell you how to whitewash your soul. It’s your money now, and a billion dollars buys a lot of forgiveness.”

In two quick strides Toys closed the distance between them and struck Vox across the mouth. Not with the pistol. He used his open hand, a single whipcrack of a slap that spun Vox violently around and sent him crashing into the table. It tipped under his weight and Vox fell amid a torrent of exploding cartons of food and cutlery. He landed heavily, his face and chest splattered with hot soup and rice and cooked lamb. Vox screamed and slapped at his skin. But before he could recover, Toys bent down and shoved the barrel of the pistol hard against Vox’s temple.

“Shut your mouth,” whispered Toys in an icy hiss. “So help me God, Hugo, if you say one more word I will kill you.”

Vox groaned and pawed at his mouth. His lip was pulped and bleeding and he stared at the red smear on the back of his hand. Despite Toys’s warning, Vox growled, “If you want all of it then take it and fuck you. The bank codes are in-”

“I have the bank codes,” snarled Toys, “but I don’t want your sodding money. Piss on you and every penny of it. Keep it and choke on it.”

Vox turned his head, ignoring the presence of the gun, and he glared up at Toys. “Then what do you fucking want?” When Toys did not speak, Vox chuckled. “Well goddamn,” he said wonderingly, “I can see it in your eyes, boy, you really have lost your fucking mind and found Jesus. Ho-lee shit. I thought it was a scam. I thought you were running some kind of schuck, or maybe going through some kind of spring cleaning of the soul. Shit, I thought it was a frigging phase and-”

“A ‘phase’?” echoed Toys softly.

“Of course,” snapped Vox, “and that’s what it damn well is. You’re feeling some dumbass Catholic guilt because I filled your head with a bunch of bullshit about Judas last year when I was trying to get you away from that dickhead Gault. There was a point to all that, kiddo, and I thought you understood it. What, did you think I was proselytizing? I was trying to get you to understand about necessary sacrifice and how sometimes we all have to make a hard choice. Was I wrong about you? Are you too fucking stupid to understand that?”

“No,” murmured Toys, “I understood you perfectly.”

He cocked the hammer of the pistol, and it was the loudest sound Vox ever heard.

“Listen to me, Hugo,” Toys said, so very softly. “Try to understand. Try, for once, to listen objectively. Don’t filter it through your own agenda. Just this once. Can you do that?”

Vox cleared his throat. His face and back hurt. The food was trickling down inside his clothes. “Yeah, sure, kiddo. Say your piece.”

Toys leaned so close that his voice was a hot breeze on Vox’s ear. “You lied to me, Hugo.”

“Fuck it, kid, I lie to every-”

“Shhhh. Don’t say anything. Just listen.” The barrel of the gun slid along the line of Vox’s cheek. “I never wanted your money. You thought I did because that’s all you’re capable of thinking. I almost pity you. Even Sebastian wasn’t like that. At least he could love something. Amirah… your mother. Sebastian loved her. But you, Hugo? You don’t love anything. I doubt you ever have.”

Vox started to say something, to protest that statement, but Toys leaned toward him, forehead to forehead, the pistol now touching the point of Vox’s chin.

“Please,” begged Toys, “please don’t say anything. Don’t say that you love me. I’ve heard that. You said it a thousand times. That you love me like a son. Don’t let me hear you say those words. I can do more than kill you. I will if you say that.”

Vox said nothing.

“I’m not like you, Hugo. I’m not like Sebastian, either. I’m not strong in the same way… but I’m not weak in the same way, either. I didn’t know that before. I thought I was weak, I thought I was broken. A broken toy. Quaint, I know. Corny. But it isn’t the way things are, and I didn’t know that until I read the files. I could have forgiven you about the money. After all, it’s not even your money to give. It’s all stolen, it’s all blood money, and I have enough blood on my hands as it is. I could have forgiven you about Upier 531. A gene therapy that could cure your cancer? Something that could make you live for years? Maybe forever? That’s wonderful, Hugo. That’s magic, even if it’s unproven. I could forgive any risk you’d take to change that.”

Tears welled in Toys’s eyes and fell on Vox’s cheek.

“But the price you were willing to pay. Good Christ, Hugo. All those people? What is it with you? What was it with Sebastian and the Seven Kings? Are people unreal to you? Do you think they’re simply bit-part players in your personal drama? No-don’t say anything. I know the answer. That’s exactly what you, and what people like you, think. No one else is real, no one else matters. Only you, your power, your profit, and whatever pieces of the world you can steal.”

He sniffed, but the tears still fell. Vox was frozen to stillness.

“Hugo… you think that I’m like a son to you. Or, you thought so. When you found out you were dying I was the only way for you to become immortal. Fathers do that with their sons. That’s what you thought you were going to leave behind. Me-a clone of you, someone to carry on the things you’ve done your whole life. More murders, more plots and plans. More chaos. When you looked at me, that’s what you saw.”

Toys pressed the pistol harder against Vox’s chin.

“How could you hate anyone so much that you would want them to be like you?”

A last tear rolled from Toys’s eye and fell, striking Vox on the lips.

Toys straightened and stepped back, his arm out, gun pointed, the barrel trembling but only slightly.

“You are a monster, Hugo,” murmured Toys. “I’m not.”

Vox sat up and wiped away the salty tear on his lips. He sneered at Toys. “Yeah? Then what the fuck are you?”

The answer was there in the young man’s eyes for Vox to read. The hand holding the pistol stopped trembling, the black eye of the barrel stared without pity.

Then Toys dropped the pistol onto the tile floor.

“I’m damned,” he said.

Without another word, he turned and walked through the house and out the front door.

Vox refilled his glass and drank.

He stared at the bank account log-in on the screen, seeing a smeared version of it through the hot tears in his eyes.

Beneath his skin he could feel the changes, feel the tissues moving and adapting.

He drank the Scotch.

“Fuck you,” he said aloud.

And reached for the bottle.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The president of the United States was ten feet tall.

Even seated behind his desk in the Oval Office he was a giant, towering over Mr. Church, who stood with his hands clasped behind his back. The giant plasma screen in the Hangar conference room had flawless fidelity and except for the disparate scale, the president might have been there in the room.

“I wish I had more encouraging news, Mr. President,” said Church. “However, we are still assessing the intelligence brought to us by Captain Ledger.”

“I have to admit that I’m disappointed. I expected more. I expected to hear that you’d at least confirmed the location of all seven of the devices.”

“When I learn to perform actual magic, Mr. President, I will make sure you receive the memo.”

The president said nothing. With anyone else from the president of Russia to his own chief of staff he would have fired back a retort and fried them. Instead, he cleared his throat.

After a moment, Church said, “We have, in fact, established probable locations on four of the devices. There is a high probability that the one in Rasouli’s photo is located in or near the Aghajari oil refinery in Iran. There is a slightly lower but still actionable probability that the other three are at the Beiji oil refinery in Iraq, the Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, and the Toot oil field in Pakistan. DMS teams are en route to those locations. When and if we get locations on the other three I want to do a coordinated and simultaneous soft infiltration of all seven. We should get the best JSOC teams in the air.”

The Joint Special Operations Command included many of the nation’s elite teams, including Delta and the SEALs.

“What about the device here in the States?”

“We need to remain at our highest state of readiness without doing anything that sends a signal. Not to our allies, not to our enemies, and not to the world press. At this point we don’t know if there is a device on U.S. soil, and if there is we have no idea where it might be. It could be a red herring, or it could be real, we don’t know. So far there are no hints on Rasouli’s drive beyond a possibility of our unknown enemies targeting oil fields.”

“We have a lot of oil fields, Deacon.”

“I am all too aware of that, Mr. President.”

The president sighed and rubbed his tired eyes. “I want to hang Vox’s head on the Capitol building spire.”

“Get in line,” said Church dryly. “But as much as we both want to see that happen, we don’t know if Vox is our enemy in this particular game.”

“He steered Rasouli toward Ledger.”

“Yes, which means that our only source of information about a potentially catastrophic situation came about because of that.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that Vox has had a change of heart and now wants to help us avoid an act of terrorism. You couldn’t sell that on a soap opera.”

“I believe you know my take on Hugo’s patriotism.”

“Then what is his role in this?”

“He is a trickster and manipulator. If he delivered a workable cure for cancer I would look for an angle. If he’s helping us then he has a way to profit from that.”

“Enemy of my enemy?” suggested the president. Church shrugged.

“Unknown. Now that we know the scope of his treachery as the head of the Seven Kings, we know that he has more friends in the Middle East than he has here. Iran would be in that family.”

“So… he could be helping Rasouli,” ventured the president. “If this is a real threat to Iran’s oil fields, then Vox could be using us to help an ally.”

“Yes. That’s likely, but it doesn’t mean that it’s Hugo’s only motive.”

“I’m putting a lot of trust in you and MindReader, Deacon. We have to find those nukes. We can’t allow a single device to detonate.”

“We may not have a choice, Mr. President. I believe that it would be prudent to begin working on how to manage a crisis based on a variety of worst-case scenarios.”

“I just had that conversation with State. No matter where a bomb goes off it creates a different political nightmare. At this point it’s impossible to determine which worst-case scenario is actually the worst. On one side there’s the risk to civilian populations, on another the risk of contamination to the oil fields is considerable. And the political fallout, pun intended, could cripple us in the region.”

“I wish Captain Ledger had been able to record that conversation. We’d be able to haul Iran before NATO and the world and hang them out to dry for consorting with Vox. They would have to back down on their nuclear program-”

“Which would be nice,” interrupted Church, “but it would still leave us with seven possible nukes in place, and no one to blame.”

“We can blame Vox and the Seven Kings.”

“We could,” said Church dubiously, “but we would be guessing. That might sharpen focus or distract it entirely. Guesswork doesn’t put our true enemy in the crosshairs.”

The president looked at his watch. “I’m heading to the Situation Room now. We’ll conference you in. Two minutes.”

“I’ll be here,” said Church.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The King of Thorns stretched out a pale hand to accept the cell phone offered by his fourth son. Grigor’s fingernails, thick and dark, curled around the slender phone, trapping it in his palm like a tiny mouse caught by a spider. He was familiar with phones, but he did not care for them. All they possessed was sound. No smell, no taste. With a small sneer of distaste he put the phone to his ear.

“Yes.”

“Grigor,” said Charles LaRoque, “Your knight failed.”

“Failed?”

“Yes, and I am very disappointed,” said LaRoque in a waspish tone. “I was led to believe that the knights were more capable than this. A simple hit on a single target. Perhaps I should have hired someone who understands his profession.”

Grigor’s fingers tightened on the phone. Cracks jagged their way through the plastic cover.

“How did it happen?”

“Who cares how it happened? It happened. He failed. You failed, Grigor, because you chose the knight. You chose someone who apparently could not complete a simple mission, and now we have a potentially catastrophic situation. His body is still at the target site.”

“I-” began Grigor, but the Scriptor cut him off.

“Don’t humiliate yourself with excuses, Grigor. Clean it up and complete the assignment. Do not disappoint me again, I’m warning you.”

The line went dead and Grigor lowered the phone from his ear. He regarded it with hooded eyes as if by looking at the device he could see the weak, doughy face of the new Scriptor. His white fingers curled around the phone until they formed a fist. There was a screech of protesting metal and plastic, and then Grigor opened his hand to let the mangled pieces fall.

Silence washed through the darkness for several moments.

“Nothing ever changes, does it?” asked Hugo Vox.

Grigor turned. Vox stood at the foot of the dais, a glass of Scotch in his hand. In the year since he had first met the former King of Fear, Vox had dwindled from a bombastic fat man to a ghost. His flesh was as loose as his clothes, and there were dark circles under his eyes.

“You heard everything?”

Vox nodded. “Charlie’s old man treated you like dog shit and so did his grandfather. How the fuck did you put up with it this long?”

A grunt was Grigor’s only reply.

“Are you going to do what LaRoque wants?” asked Vox.

“Yes,” said Grigor.

The American nodded. “Because you want to, not because you have to, though. Am I right?”

Grigor gave that a single nod.

“Good,” said the American. “That works for us.”

Grigor made a slight gesture and one of his aides came hurrying out of the shadows. Grigor spoke to him in the language of the Red Order-a language Vox had learned well enough over the last year to catch the gist of Grigor’s orders. The aide bowed and scuttled away.

“It will be so delicious to hang him by the heels and let his blood rain down. I would not even drink it. I would let it pool upon the ground and then piss in it.”

“I like the way you think,” said Vox, “but we need him alive for a little while longer. Him and Rasouli.”

“Why? All we need now are the codes.”

He gestured to a small device that lay on a brass table beside his throne. It was a converted satellite phone that had been rebuilt with Vox’s own scrambler technology.

“Everything’s in motion, Grigor,” assured Vox. “A little more patience, a couple of tweaks, and then you can start your revolution and crack the pillars of heaven.”

The King of Thorns glared with red hatred into the shadows. “I wonder sometimes if I can trust you, Hugo.”

“You can definitely-” Vox suddenly doubled over as a ferocious coughing fit tore through him. He spat out the whiskey and reeled, catching himself on a stone wall as the coughs racked his wasted frame. The coughing fit lasted a whole minute during which Grigor did nothing except observe with a faint smile of amusement on his lips.

Vox tore a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his mouth as the last deep coughs shook him. When he removed it the center of the cloth was stained with a few drops of blood. The scent of it perfumed the air.

“God,” he wheezed. “Goddamn it…”

Grigor traced the contours of his own mouth with the tip of a black fingernail.

“What does it feel like to be so weak? To be sick?”

Vox glared up at him from beneath knitted brows. “Fuck you.”

The King of Thorns laughed.

“You’d better step up the goddamn treatments,” rasped Vox, “because that scrambler isn’t worth shit without the access code, and without that scrambler you and your bloodsucking freak show of a race are going to remain slaves for the rest of time. So wipe that shit-eating smile off your face and find out where that asshole Dr. Hasbrouck is. I need my shots.”

The smile on Grigor’s face faded only a little as the echoes of Vox’s words bounced off the cold stone walls of the caverns. “The doctor says that you’d never survive the last round of treatments.”

“You better pray he’s wrong, Grigor.” Vox spat onto the floor. The sputum was dark with blood. “If I die then all your dreams die with me.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Ghost and I made it down to the hotel’s basement laundry without being seen by anyone. I opened the back door and listened for commotion or sirens. There were none. I was right-no one had heard the fight and the shot was either silenced or fired from a great distance. It felt a little weird to me, even after everything I’ve done, that such a traumatic and dramatic moment could go unnoticed by people a couple of floors away. It makes you wonder about all of the ghastly things that happen every day all around us.

There were so many things about what had just occurred that I didn’t know where to begin thinking about them. No-that wasn’t true. The goon with the fangs knew about the flash drive, and he seemed pretty damned stunned when I mentioned the nukes. I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. Did it mean that he knew what was on the flash drive but didn’t think either Rasouli had told me or that I’d had a chance to check the drive’s contents? Or was the nuke thing a big surprise to him?

Or did I not yet know enough to ask myself the right question?

Yes, muttered the Cop in my head.

The Warrior was still freaked out about the goon with the fangs. When you spend most of your life training in martial arts, military technique, and the specialized skills of special ops as I have, you come to accept that combat in all of its forms is a science. It’s largely mathematical. If you hit someone in a specific part of the body at a precise angle and with sufficient force there is a predictable response, give or take some necessary variables. The same applies for a wide range of things, from lifting a barbell full of weights to shooting a pistol at a target. For some of this stuff there are thousands of years of trial and error as well as data collection to support what we know. Not what we guess but what we know. When you separate it all from sports or esoteric pursuits, combat is a science. I’ve dedicated my life to that science; if I have a church then that’s it.

However, what I just experienced did not make sense according to anything I knew or believed.

I will rip your throat out and drink your life. The killer’s voice kept whispering that to me.

I pulled out my cell and called Church.

“Go,” he said.

“Boss, I am having a really, really bad day,” I said.

“Are you talking about the devices?”

“Not directly.”

“I’m on with the president. Do you need immediate assistance or can you wait ten?”

“I can wait ten,” I said, “but not eleven.”

“Understood.” Church disconnected.

I sighed. In a very odd and childish way I felt snubbed by Church. I recognized it as a human overreaction to great fear mingled with physical injury. I needed Mommy or Daddy to kiss the boo-boo and tell me everything’s all right. So, yeah, I’m immature at times. Just like everyone else.

I found a cracked bowl and filled it with clean water for Ghost. While he drank, I tried to assess my current situation. It was like inventorying a Kansas trailer park after tornado season. I hurt in so many places I stopped counting. My arms throbbed from blocking his punches and kicks, let alone those spots where his shots had actually landed. When I pulled up my shirt I saw huge red bruises forming; the intensity of color a clear indication of the amount of tissue damage he’d inflicted. Last time I had bruises like that was when I’d taken a pair of heavy-caliber rifle rounds in my vest; the Kevlar had kept me alive but the psi of the impacts had to go somewhere.

Ghost looked up from his bowl, water dripping from his snout. I doubt Shepherds could identify bruises by sight, but his sensitive nose could probably smell the blood seeping through the damaged muscle tissue.

He whuffed and began drinking again.

“Whuff,” I agreed.

I dearly wanted to curl into a fetal position on my couch and sleep until November. Alternately, six shots of Jim Beam and a gallon of beer would work well as comfort food; but I was deep in Indian country, and there were hard miles to go before I had any kind of comfort.

“If you’d gone to the damn FBI academy you could have been politely arresting people between afternoons on the golf course,” I reminded myself. All of my inner voices told me to shut the fuck up.

The coin-operated washers and dryers were full but no one was down there. I jammed the cellar door shut, then I turned on the faucet in the laundry sink and held my head under the cold water for almost a minute. The water that sluiced over my scalp ran red for almost half that time. The cold knocked the pain level down a few notches though, and I could feel my brain reluctantly starting to clear.

My phone rang. Church was early. Sputtering and pawing water out of my eyes, I pulled my phone and punched the button.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Hello,” she said. “How many brownie points do I have now?”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Ah… shit,” I said into the phone.

Violin laughed.

“That was you?” I asked.

Instead of answering she asked, “How badly are you hurt?”

“Why do you care?”

“ How badly are you hurt? ”

I sighed. “Somewhere between trampled by a soccer mob and found dead in a ditch, but… I’ll live. What’s it to you, anyway?”

Violin took a beat before answering, and even then she didn’t answer the question. “You’re lucky.”

I clicked the button to initiate the trace. Not that I thought it was worth the effort, but what the hell. “Lucky? In what way?”

“The knight should have killed you.”

“‘Knight’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Another pause. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this.”

“Will it keep me alive?”

“Maybe.”

“Then tell me, for Christ’s sake. That son of a bitch nearly tore my head off. You should have seen him. You should have seen his frigging teeth.”

“I have-”

“He had fangs for- Wait, what?”

“I have seen his teeth,” said Violin. “Not that same knight, of course, but I’ve seen their teeth.”

“When? How?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you should not have seen him at all.”

“Meaning that I shouldn’t have and still be alive? Like that?”

“Like that, yes.”

I was quiet for a moment, thinking it through. “What are they?”

She took her time before answering. “I don’t know for sure, Joseph.”

“I think you’re lying to me. And what’s with the ‘Joseph’? Why so formal?”

“I like ‘Joseph’ better than ‘Joe.’ ‘Joseph’ is more dignified, more serious than a ‘Joe.’”

“I have to warn you,” I said, “I’m more of a ‘Joe’ personality type.”

“We’ll see.”

“Wait, rewind a second. You called that guy a knight. Knight of what? Round Table? Columbus?”

“No,” she said. “I can’t tell you that without approval.”

“Whose approval?”

She didn’t answer.

“You’re wasting my time, girl,” I said. “I’m going to hang up now and get my ass out of here.”

“You can’t,” she warned. “The knight was dropped off by a car and it keeps circling the block.”

“You’re still watching my hotel?” I asked, not sure if that was a comfort or another layer of worry to stack on top of everything else.

“Yes, and if you go outside they’ll see you. The best thing you can do right now is wait.”

“I don’t want to be here when the cops arrive.”

“I’m monitoring the police channels. No one has reported a thing.”

Which is what I expected, but didn’t say so. “What if they send in another of these knights? Or a whole team of them?”

“I don’t think they will. Its broad daylight and they won’t risk a full-out raid, and they won’t risk a room-by-room search. Especially since they can’t know what happened to the knight who attacked you. They’ll circle for a while and then they’ll break off and fall back to wait for fresh intelligence.”

“You seem to know a lot about them.”

“We know enough.”

“We?” I asked again. “Who’s team are you on? Mossad, MI6?”

“No.”

“AISE?” I asked. With her accent she could easily be with the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna, Italy’s version of the CIA.

“No, and stop trying to guess,” she said. “You won’t.”

Impasse.

“What can you tell me?” I asked, fighting to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “If you’re on my side, Violin, then help me out. What am I facing here? That bastard had incredible strength and fangs. Tell me something that makes sense of that.”

“The knights are extremely dangerous. That’s all I’m prepared to say right now. Just be glad you’re alive.”

“I’m always glad I’m alive. I leap out of bed singing Disney songs. But look, I know a little bit about genetics and I can’t see how gene therapy accounts for his strength. He threw me all over the place and he simply did not have the mass for it. That guy was spooky strong.”

Again she evaded the question. “Be glad he didn’t bite you.”

“I’m also always glad when people don’t bite me.” I checked the trace. It was still running but it was clearly getting nowhere. According to the meter the call was coming from Antarctica, which I somehow doubted. “If I tell you what the knight said to me, will you tell me what he meant?”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Let’s try. The knight asked me to give him what Rasouli gave me.”

“What did Rasouli give you?”

“Indigestion and a feeling like my right hand will never be clean again.”

“You won’t tell me?”

“Maybe later. My question is, why was the knight looking for that. Or, better yet, who sent the knight?”

“I’m not sure, because it doesn’t make much sense for the knight to be working against Rasouli.”

“Do they work for him?”

“No. They work for his allies. That’s why it doesn’t make sense.”

But as she said that her words slowed as if she was suddenly thinking that it did make sense. When I tried to get her to explain, she stonewalled me again. So I came at her from a different angle. “I think he told me your name. Maybe it’s a last name or a call sign, or maybe it’s your organization.”

“He didn’t know my real name.”

“Well, I’m just telling you what the knight told me.”

“What name did he say?” she asked cautiously.

I said, “Arklight.”

She gasped, very high and sharp, and then she took a long time before she spoke. “That’s not my name.”

“Then who-?”

She hung up.

“Damn it.”

It was so frustrating because I wanted more information. I wanted to know about that freak that shook my cookie bag back at the hotel. What the hell was he? How could anyone be that strong? Nothing I know could explain what just happened.

That really and truly scared me. It kept the adrenaline pumping through my system, and my hands still shook.

Ghost whined and rubbed against my leg. His eyes were glassy.

I stripped off my bloody shirt, opened a dryer that had about half-finished its cycle, and stole a white long-sleeved shirt that was damp and a bit too small. The buttons gapped but I could get it closed. My jeans were bloodstained, but there’s just enough of an artsy-cum-punk crowd in the capital to suggest that the red splotches were some kind of statement. Yeah, that statement was “Holy shit, I’m still alive.”

My hair was still dyed black from the police station raid, and I finger-combed it straight back and pulled on a painter’s cap I found that looked like it was a thousand years old. I rolled up my bloody shirt and wrapped it in a bath towel that I also stole from the dryer.

My phone rang again. Her.

“They’re gone,” she said. “It’s safe.”

And she hung up again.

I looked at Ghost. “Women, y’know?”

He whuffed.

Then I opened the back door, saw that the street was clear, and we went out.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

I cut through the streets in a random pattern. I used glass storefront windows to check behind me and across the street. I went into stores and out the back, I cut through alleys. If there was a tail I did not see it.

My cell rang and when I saw who it was I ducked into an alley to answer the call. Bug doesn’t speak Persian.

“About frigging time,” I growled into the phone.

“Hello to you, too, man,” said Bug.

“What the hell have you been doing? Playing Halo?”

“No-though the new version of Halo is pretty badass. They got this one level that-”

“My whole body is a lethal weapon, you know,” I said. “I know more ways to kill you than you know how to die. Are you aware of that?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I promise I’ll faint when I take my coffee break. I wanted to get back to you on those books you had me look up. Are you sure you have the correct titles?”

“It’s word of mouth from an unreliable source.”

“I know, Rasouli. King Dickhead of all the world.”

“That’s the one.”

“The thing is, I can’t see how the Saladin Codex can be connected to the nukes or anything related to nuclear science.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s a math book that was written in the twelfth century based on an even older book, and I’m no physicist, but I’m pretty sure the whole nuke thing came later than that.”

“Shit.”

“And,” added Bug, “it’s not even a good math book.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s a rewrite of a classic book called Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-gabr wa’l-muqabala.”

Bug murdered the pronunciation, but I could make out what he meant. “The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing,” I translated.

“Right. It was written by some dude named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who was a noted mathematician of his time. Apparently ‘ al-gabr ’ is the original word for algebra, which is what the book is about. One of the earliest books on the subject, or maybe the earliest book on the subject.”

“Algebra,” I mused. “Physics is all about math, isn’t it? Physics and nuclear technology are kissing cousins…”

“Well-sure, but this is pretty basic stuff. Nothing that gives us direct insight into nuclear science. I mean, c’mon, I learned this stuff in tenth grade.”

“Okay, what about the Saladin Codex?”

“That was written in 1191 by someone named Ibrahim al-Asiri. He was a diplomat who worked for Saladin.”

“Rasouli mentioned Saladin,” I said, and explained what he’d said.

“Huh,” grunted Bug, unimpressed. “Anyway, al-Asiri was also a mathematician, but apparently not a great one. His book attempted to refute some of the theories from the earlier work. No one was buying it, though, because algebra isn’t a theory. Math is math.”

“Tell that to my tax attorney,” I muttered. “How’s this help us?”

“That’s what I’m saying, Joe, I don’t see how it does. Al-Asiri’s book was largely discredited. At most it’s a footnote in the history of math.”

“If it was dismissed, then why is it even a footnote?”

“Discredited,” Bug corrected, “not dismissed. And it was only that particular book that was discredited, not the author. Al-Asiri was a very important man from a very, very important family. He was second cousin to Saladin and was involved in many of Saladin’s most historically significant treaties during the Crusades.”

“Saladin’s name keeps coming up in this. Rasouli made a point of mentioning it, so maybe there’s a clue there,” I mused. “What about the word ‘Saracen,’ I know that relates, but how exactly?”

Bug tapped some keys. “Easy one. During the time of the Crusades the Europeans called all Muslims Saracens. Later that changed to Mohammadan and then Muslim. Purely a European word choice.”

“Okay. What about the other one? The Book of Shadows?”

“Yeah,” said Bug slowly, “that’s where we go out of the blue and into the black. And by black I mean magic. Or, maybe it’s white magic. What do I know from magic?”

“Magic?”

“Uh-huh. the Book of Shadows is the book of spells for witchcraft.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Serious as a heart attack, Joe. What the hell are you into over there? I mean… is the DMS suddenly at war with the forces of darkness?”

I thought about the freak with the fangs.

“Right now, Bug, I’d believe just about anything. Look-keep digging and get back to me with anything you find.”

I hung up and lingered in the alley for a moment wondering if Bug’s information moved me forward toward understanding or pulled a bag over my head.

“Witches. What do you think?” I asked Ghost.

He lifted his leg and peed on the wall.

“That’s what I figured,” I said.

We kept moving.

Chapter Forty

“Hey! I got something,” cried Bug as his image popped onto a view screen. His face glowed with excitement.

After signing off with Aunt Sallie, Circe had buried herself in the material from the flash drive, and Rudy had followed her in, picking up the thread of her logic and working with her on the psychological aspects of the case. They looked up from the semicircle of data screens.

“We’re in the middle of something, Bug-” Circe, began, but Bug overrode her.

“I’ve been tearing apart the documents on the flash drive,” he said. “At first there didn’t seem to be anything more than what we already had, but on a whim I matched the volume of data we’ve downloaded against the drive’s storage potential and there was a discrepancy.”

Rudy frowned. “Because some of the files were supposedly destroyed by moisture after Rasouli’s agent swallowed the drive, correct?”

Bug gave him a pitying stare. “Silly mortal. ’Destroyed’ is a relative term. Or, maybe it’s a term people who are a lot less super-genius smart than me use.”

“Bug,” warned Circe quietly.

“Yeah, yeah, okay. There’s more stuff on the drive than was openly indexed, and I’m not talking about real or faked damaged files. I’m talking about stuff that was coded to react like damaged files.”

“You lost me,” admitted Rudy.

“A file name is nothing but a piece of computer language. Zeros and ones, but arranged to create a readable name. When you give a file a name the computer writes that name in computer language, but here someone deliberately coded a few files so that their names appear as ‘read error’ warnings. That way they get hidden among the errors from the damage.”

“Devious,” Rudy agreed. “How many hidden files are there and what is in them?”

“There are ten files in two separate subfolders. One was marked BOS/SC, and I don’t think I have to go too far out on a limb to presume what that stands for.”

“You lost me again,” said Rudy.

“It was part of the verbal intel Ledger got from Rasouli,” explained Bug. “Rasouli made oblique references to two books, the Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex. BOS/SC. Anyway, when I cracked the files I expected to find complete texts or abstracts, but instead I got nine scanned images saved as pdfs. Very low-res and muddy. The other file is weird. All I could find was a Word doc with two words written in English. ‘Fuzzy math.’ That’s it. I’m running some additional cleanup and deep extraction programs to see if there are other hidden layers, but so far, bubkes.”

“Fuzzy math?” asked Rudy.

Circe grunted. “The Codex is supposed to be questionable commentary on an exact science, right? That says ‘fuzzy math’ to me. Could be some code hidden there. You get anything from the Codex, Bug?”

“Not so far. We don’t actually have a copy of the Codex, so I can’t check to see if there’s anything buried in the text.”

“Damn. Who has one?”

Bug made a face. “There is exactly one copy and it’s in the National Museum in Tehran.”

“Crap,” said Circe. “Any full or partial scans online?”

“Not that I’ve found, but searching all foreign-language databases will take a little longer.”

“What about the other one?” asked Rudy. “The Book of Shadows. Surely I’ve heard of that somewhere…”

Circe nodded. “It’s the book of spells used in Wicca.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” complained Rudy, flapping a hand. “Really? We’ve done zombies, clones, and mutants, now the DMS is squaring off against black magic?”

“Don’t laugh,” said Circe with surprising heat. “And stop being so Catholic for a minute. Wicca isn’t devil worship or black magic. That was all medieval propaganda created to suppress the rise of education among women. And even the concept of ‘black’ magic is completely unconnected to the modern Wicca, which is earthcentric and practiced according to positive energy and harmony with nature.”

Rudy held up his hands, palms out. “Mea culpa.”

Circe gave him a harrumph. “The modern practice is built mostly on a set of traditions created by Gerald Gardner, who first introduced the Book of Shadows to the initiates of his landmark Bricket Wood coven in the 1950s. It eventually became the central text for most of the other branches of the faith, including Alexandrianism and Mohsianism. But… I do have to admit that I don’t see how it could possibly relate at all to nuclear bombs.”

“I don’t think it does,” said Bug, “and the Gardner book probably isn’t the Book of Shadows involved in this case. Rasouli didn’t say anything to Joe about witches. Here, let me put the pdfs up and you tell me if this is Wiccan stuff or not.” He loaded an Adobe program and then opened the nine pdf files, throwing them onto nine smaller screens. Each file was a low-resolution scan of a single page from what looked like an ancient manuscript. Rudy bent forward and frowned at it. There were green and brown paintings of exotic plants that he did not recognize and line after line of writing in a language Rudy could not identify. Two of the pages were only text, and one was a complex diagram of the sun, with a face in the center and writing running in circles around the drawing.

“What language is that?” Rudy asked.

“I don’t know,” said Bug. “I just found these, and I wanted to show you before I started the recognition software. And the images are very low-res, so some of it might be hard to-”

Circe gasped. “My God!”

Rudy and Bug stared at her.

“I know what that is,” she said.

Chapter Forty-One

The good news was that between the CIA, the DMS, and a few other alphabet agencies, we had safe houses and equipment drops all over Tehran. One agency spook I knew told me that he could hardly walk down the street without seeing someone from the “family.”

“Invisible network my ass,” he added.

So, I went to the closest haven. When Echo Team had first arrived in Tehran we spent half a day at a safe house run by Barrier. It was staffed by two agents, a father and son. The father, Fariel, looked old enough to have been a school chum of Xerxes. His son, Cyrus, was a schoolteacher and probably the most boring person I’ve ever met. The kind of guy who speaks in a nasal monotone and can only talk about what he saw on TV.

Right now, though? I could use normal and boring. That house also had plenty of weapons and equipment. Rearming would go a long way toward chasing off the shakes. If I’d had a good fighting knife this morning then the encounter in my hotel room would have been a whole lot shorter and more satisfying.

At least I think it would have.

The Barrier safe house was a one-stop, two-room little pillbox near a bus stop. Lots of people coming and going all the time, lots of strangers. Good place to hide, right there in the open.

I knocked. There was no special trick. I didn’t have to knock three times then two then wait and knock four times. That was the movies. I knocked, and they answered.

Except that’s not exactly what happened.

As the locked clicked open and the door swung inward, Ghost stiffened and gave a sharp woof. Even dazed as he was he knew that something was wrong.

I pushed inside, driving whoever was behind the door in and back. I kicked the door shut as the man fell. I pulled the pistol and dropped into a combat crouch.

The man who lay on the floor staring up at me was Cyrus, the son of the man who ran the safe house. He looked up at me with eyes that were wild with fear and pain.

He was covered with blood, head to toe.

Ghost growled, but he was still trembling and looked ready to collapse.

I squatted near him and whispered in Persian. “How many are there?”

He tried to speak but only blood bubbled from between his lips. Cyrus gestured wildly toward the doorway at the end of the short foyer.

I was already in motion, running with quick, small steps, the pistol held in front of me, mouth set and hard. At the end of the foyer I crouched and did a fast look around the corner.

The living room was a study in crimson.

I eased around the corner.

Nothing moved.

But it was not empty. A man-Fariel Omidi-hung on the wall. Big carpenter nails had been driven savagely through his wrists and hands and feet. He had been crucified.

His head hung low, and from the damage I saw there was no way he could still be alive. No way in hell.

Ghost whined from the foyer but I waved him to stillness.

I could see through the living room into the eat-in kitchen. The back door was open to the sunlight. The door to the bathroom stood ajar and I crabbed sideways and wheeled around to cover the interior space. Toilet, sink, and tub. All bloody, all empty.

Every cabinet and storage trunk had been torn open. All of the weapons and equipment were gone. Even the trapdoor beside the fridge had been ripped from its hinges. The boxes of grenades, shape charges, detonators, and other explosives were gone.

At the back door I peered into the alley. There were two bloody footprints and then tire tracks in the dirt.

This was all past tense. I lowered my gun and pulled the door shut, engaged the locks and propped a chair under the handle. Then I grabbed a bunch of dish towels and raced back to the entrance foyer.

Cyrus was still alive, but only just. I gingerly peeled back the shreds of his clothes to see how bad he was hurt, and I was sorry I did it. Everything had been done to him. Cuts and punctures. The bruised and ravaged marks of tools, probably pliers. Big burned patches. Maybe a portable propane burner. That and more.

I was amazed he was still alive.

I sponged blood from his nose and mouth and rolled some of the towels to place under his head. God only knows how Cyrus had managed to stay on his feet long enough to answer the door. Hope, maybe? If so, it was one more crushing disappointment on the worst day of his life. Cyrus was shivering with shock. I rushed back to the living room for a throw rug and draped it over him. The rug was bloody, too, but that didn’t seem important.

“Hey, buddy,” I said gently. “Can you understand me?”

His mouth worked for a moment and he made only mewling sounds, but he nodded ever so slightly.

“Who did this to you?”

He shook his head.

“How many were there? How big a team?”

Cyrus managed to raise his hand a few inches. He held up a single finger.

“One?” I asked. “You’re saying that one man did this.”

He shook his head but held up the single finger again. I tried to get him to explain. It wasn’t one team, it seemed. It was one, but he objected to my choice of “man” or even “woman.”

Cyrus tried hard to speak, but each time it came out as a meaningless wet mumble. And then with crushing and horrible realization I understood why.

They had cut out his tongue.

I closed my eyes for a moment and tried hard not to scream. Ghost whined from the living room doorway.

When I opened my eyes I saw Cyrus looking at me. He was slipping past the point where pain mattered to him, and he knew it. We both knew it.

“Listen to me, Cyrus,” I said, dabbing cold sweat from his forehead, “I want to be straight with you, okay?”

He began to cry, knowing what I was going to say; but he nodded.

“You’re hurt bad. Very bad. I–I can call for an ambulance, but…” I let it trail off. I was feeling too cowardly to put it into words. Cyrus reached out with his swollen, bloody hand and did something that broke my heart. He patted my thigh. He was taking me off the hook from having to tell him that he was dying.

I took his hand and held it.

“I’ll find whoever did this,” I promised him. “So help me God, I will find them.”

He smiled with his ruined mouth. A small thing.

Cyrus touched one finger to his bloody chest and then slowly drew something on the floor. He used the pad of his finger to make a crimson dot, and then overlaid it with the symbol of the cross.

He looked from it to me and tried once more to speak the name of his killer. No-not a name. A word, a description. Two toneless syllables formed by a mouth that could not even speak that word.

Monster.

It was a horrible word, but it was no surprise to me. All this damage, all of the signs of physical power and rage-doors torn from their hinges, these men brutalized. I wonder if Cyrus and his father had stared into glaring red eyes as they were torn apart. A knight had done this, and if there was a better example of a monster hunting the streets of this country, I couldn’t imagine it.

Cyrus sighed and his hand dropped away. I sat with him while all that had made up this little man evaporated into the red darkness. I hadn’t liked him when I’d met him yesterday. A boring little guy who hadn’t much liked me either. But now that was different. He would live in my heart and head forever. Cyrus Omidi. A victim of the very old war that defines the Middle East? Or a victim of something new?

I spoke his name aloud seven times. Don’t ask me why. It felt like something I had to do.

I got to my feet and walked into the living room.

Fariel Omidi was past helping. There was nothing I could do for him. But I said his name seven times, too.

While I stood there, my phone rang.

“Captain,” Church said, “sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. Give me a sit rep.”

Chapter Forty-Two

I turned away from the dead man and stared at the floor. Ghost came and lay at my feet.

“I don’t know where to begin,” I said into the phone.

“Tell me,” said Church.

So, I told him. About Violin. About the Red Knight in my hotel room. About the dead men whose pain seemed to scream through the air around me. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but Church cut right through my words.

“Are you injured?” he demanded. “Do you need immediate medical attention?”

I paused. “No. No, I’m good.”

“Are you in shock?”

“I-” I began and then stopped, realizing why he was asking that. My mind replayed the last few things I’d said and there was a rising hysterical note to my voice. The room was too bright, the colors too vivid. And the smell…

I took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I’m good,” I assured him. “Been a bad day.”

“For all of us, Captain.”

We gave that a moment.

“You are going to need to get out of that location,” he said.

“I know.”

“Don’t go to another Barrier safe house. The Company has one close to you.”

“Soon as we’re done I’m out of here,” I assured him.

“The woman,” Church said, shifting back to my report. “Violin. Give me a read on her.”

“Hard to say exactly. She’s a voice on the phone and she’s probably lying to me.”

“Then give me guesswork and suppositions.”

I thought about it. “She sounds young. Late twenties. Her base accent is Italian, though she could be any nationality or race with an accent picked up by familiarity. She’s a trained sniper. She’s for hire. The people who hired her are connected to Vox, which is how Rasouli hired her. No idea whose side she’s on, though she doesn’t seem to like Rasouli. And she’s tied up with someone or something called Arklight.”

“Arklight,” he said, repeating the name slowly, seeming to appreciate it. “Interesting.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Yes. Did she confirm that she was part of Arklight?”

“No, when I asked her about it she hung up on me. Why? What’s Arklight?”

He didn’t answer.

“Yo! How about a little help for the guy standing in a room full of dead people?”

“Captain,” said Church, “to tell you anything useful about Arklight would mean betraying a confidence.”

“I don’t care.”

“It could also put you in danger.” He paused. “And, yes, I know how absurd that sounds, given the circumstances.”

“You think?”

“I need to make a call about this. In the short term, I have had dealings with Arklight in the past. Most of the time those dealings were harmonious. Working together against a shared threat, that sort of thing. But they are not allies. There are no standing nonaggression agreements between us.”

“Can you try to vague that up a bit more? I almost understood it.”

He changed the subject. “The man who attacked you at the hotel, you said that he was winning the fight? Assess that. Are we talking about superior combat skill or something else?”

“We were pretty well matched for skill and technique. It’d be hard to put a label on his fighting style, but he wasn’t trying anything on me that he hadn’t done a lot of times before. Everything was very smooth, very efficient.”

Church grunted his understanding. At a certain level, when you’re fighting to kill rather than trying to win a belt or a tournament, all style is stripped away in favor of a selection of techniques that are the most practical and effective at the moment. Experts who engage in these kinds of fights usually rely on a small percentage of the skills they’ve learned; skills that they know they can use, and which they can use without thinking about it. At that level a kick is a kick is a kick; a punch is a punch.

“What about enhancements?” Church asked.

“I don’t know. Nothing obvious, no exoskeletons or combat suit with joint servos. Nothing like that. He was faster and stronger, but the weird thing is that he didn’t have the bulk for it. This was way beyond the limits of ‘wiry strength.’”

“In the absence of the sniper, would he have won the fight?”

“Coin toss,” I admitted. “We were hurting each other, so I guess it would have come down to who wanted it more. I tend to want it quite a lot.”

“Fair enough.”

“On the other hand, let’s not rule out enhancement. Something chemical, maybe.”

“I wonder what Dr. Hu would find in a blood test. I don’t suppose you collected any-?”

“I didn’t take a cheek swab or get him to pee in a cup for me, but I have plenty of his blood on my clothes.”

“I’ll arrange a pickup.” He paused. “The attacker… gauge his strength. Use Bunny as a yardstick.”

“Twice as strong. Easily,” I said. “I know that sounds ridiculous, but that knight was a bull and-”

“Wait,” Church cut in sharply. “You just called the attacker a ‘knight.’ What did you mean by that? You didn’t mention that earlier.”

“Oh,” I said, and realized that he was right. When I’d blown through the story the first time I had called the attacker “the goon.” So I backed up and explained what Violin had told me.

There was a long silence on the phone.

“Describe the symbol Cyrus Omidi drew on the floor.”

“I can show it to you. The knight had it tattooed on his arm. I took a picture.” I fiddled with the phone and sent the e-mail.

I heard Church hitting keys to open the e-mail.

When he spoke again his voice was tight and urgent. “Captain, listen to me very carefully. Get out of that house right now.”

“Why-what’s wrong?”

“Violin was correct. That was a Red Knight you faced in your hotel and another one who killed the Omidis. That means Arklight is involved. Get out of that house immediately and call me from the CIA safe house.”

“Why-”

“ Go! ”

Chapter Forty-Three

Mr. Church set the phone down and stared at it. His hands were balled into fists on top of his desk blotter.

Then he snatched the phone up again and punched a speed dial.

“Yo,” said Aunt Sallie after two rings.

“Auntie, the situation in Iran has just gotten significantly worse.”

“We’re hunting nukes, Deke, how much fucking worse can it-?”

“Captain Ledger is being hunted by Red Knights.”

There was a stunned silence on the phone, and then Aunt Sallie whispered, “Oh my God!”

Chapter Forty-Four

“Wait,” said Bug, “what?”

“Those pages,” said Circe. “I recognize them. They’re from an ancient codex called the Voynich manuscript. I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bug dubiously. “Rasouli seemed to think this was the Book of Shadows.”

Circe shook her head. “You’re wrong, Bug. That’s the Voynich manuscript.”

“What is the Voynich manuscript?” asked Rudy. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s an old ciphertext,” Circe said as she accessed a browser and went to one of the university research sites she subscribed to. In a few seconds a screen came up with THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT MYSTERY in bold letters. She went through the directory and pulled up several scans of individual pages. The pages were crammed with writing in a language none of them knew.

Bug whistled.

“Well I’ll be damned,” murmured Rudy.

Circe pulled up more pages, and some of these had pictures. Plants, naked women, celestial diagrams. The drawings were primitive, but they were orderly-even if the sense of order was elusive. Then she found one that matched a page from Rasouli’s files.

“See? I was right,” Circe said triumphantly. In a few minutes she matched seven of the nine pages, but then she frowned as she ran through every single page of the manuscript. “Wait… did I miss them?”

“No,” said Bug. “The last two pages from Rasouli’s file aren’t in the Voynich thingee.”

“Slow down,” begged Rudy. “What is this?”

Circe took a breath. “The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book that dates back to the fifteenth century. Radio carbon dating put it somewhere between 1404 to 1438 C.E., and from the materials used it’s believed that it was created in northern Italy, which was a very important and wealthy part of Europe at the time.”

“Who wrote this book?” asked Rudy.

“That’s just it,” said Circe, “no one knows who wrote it or why. It’s named after Wilfrid Voynich, a rare-book dealer from New York who discovered the book in 1912 during a buying trip to Villa Mondragone, near Rome. It was in a trunkful of rare texts. Voynich spent the rest of his life trying to decipher the language, but he never did. In fact no one ever has.”

“Maybe it’s a fake language,” suggested Rudy.

“Doubtful,” said Bug, peering at it. “It’s too orderly.”

“Can we suppose for a moment that the two remaining pages from Rasouli’s file are from the other book, the Book of Shadows? ” suggested Rudy. “If so, they’re clearly written in the same language. Maybe it’s a secret language, reserved for use by members of a society.”

“Sure,” Circe agreed. “That’s the consensus of scholars of the book, but it is an incredibly complex language. In all there are one hundred and seventy thousand distinct glyphs, or written elements. About thirty of these glyphs are used repeatedly throughout the manuscript.”

“An alphabet?” said Bug.

“Probably, but no one has cracked it.”

“Where is the book now?” asked Rudy. “And can we get it?”

“It’s at Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but there’s no reason to get it. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to the manuscript. Every page of it, including the covers, is available online.”

Bug reached up to tap one of the pages on the screen. “Wait, isn’t that a signature? I can almost read it. Jacob something something.”

“Jacobus de Tepenecz,” said Circe. “He wasn’t the author, though. More likely he owned it for a while. De Tepenecz was a seventeenth-century physician and an expert in medical plants. In 1608 he was summoned to Prague to treat Emperor Rudolf II who was suffering from severe depression and melancholia. Because of his success with the emperor, de Tepenecz was appointed Imperial Chief Distiller. Scholars believe that he was given the Voynich manuscript as either payment or as a gift by Rudolf, who was a collector of occult books and manuscripts of arcane sciences. The ownership of the book has a lot of gaps in it. We do know that when Voynich purchased it he found a letter tucked between its pages that had been written in 1665 by Dr. Johannes Marcus Marci of Bohemia, and in that letter Dr. Marci claimed that the book was written by Roger Bacon.”

“Who was-?” prompted Rudy.

“He was a Franciscan friar, philosopher, and alchemist in the thirteenth century. His nickname was ‘Doctor Mirabilis’-‘wonderful teacher.’ But… Bacon was likely born around 122 °C.E. He died in 1294, more than a century before the book was written.”

“Unless he really could do miracles,” said Bug, but they ignored him.

“What’s in the manuscript?” asked Rudy. “I see plants and diagrams…”

“That’s just it,” answered Circe, “on the surface the book appears to be a codex of herbology. But here’s the kicker, while some of the plants in the book are recognizable, there are some plants that are either so badly drawn that they’re unrecognizable, or they are plants that are currently unknown to science. Aside from the herbal drawings, there are others, including a number of cosmological diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. There are the twelve zodiacal symbols, and each of these has thirty female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm.” She took a breath. “And there are sections that show small naked women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns. Some pages look like complex formulae, but for what is anyone’s guess. In short, we don’t know what the book is about or why it was written.”

Rudy said, “You called it a ciphertext rather than a codetext. What’s the difference? I thought a cipher was another name for code.”

Circe shook her head. “A cipher is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm. It’s mathematical. A code is simply a method used to transform a message into an obscured form. Like letter transposition or word-swapping. You decipher a code with a codebook that has the letters, words, or phrases that match the coded message. A cipher is much more complex, and it’s often the word people should be using when describing something that has been encrypted.”

“I knew that,” Bug said quietly.

“I didn’t,” said Rudy, “and I have no idea what you just said. What I want to know is what the Voynich manuscript is and how it relates to seven nuclear bombs.”

Circe blew out her cheeks. “Scholars have spent the last century trying to decipher the manuscript. How that relates, or how it helps… is anyone’s guess.”

Rudy stood and bent closer to the screens showing the two mystery pages. He looked back and forth between them, and then studied the Voynich pages. He grunted.

“What?” asked Circe.

“Well… I’m no handwriting expert,” he said slowly, “but I don’t think these other pages were written by the same person.”

Chapter Forty-Five

Mr. Church said run, so I ran.

When Church is so rattled by something that he freaks at me on the phone, then my own scare-o-meter starts burying the needle. I ran like a son of a bitch and put a lot of gone between me and the death house.

Three blocks away I cut down an alley behind an abandoned house. Once I was sure that the place was completely deserted, I broke in. Ghost was too weak to do much running, so I left him in the kitchen and quickly cleared the whole house. Six empty rooms, lots of junk, some bugs, a dead rat, and nothing else.

There was no water, so we couldn’t stay long, but I needed more information from Church. He answered my call right away.

“Are you somewhere safe?”

I explained my location.

“Very well. I’m retasking a satellite to try and track you. Echo Team is six hours out, and I’ve alerted Barrier as to the hit on their house.”

“Good,” I said, “so now tell me why I ran away like a six-year-old from a party clown. Who the hell are these Red Knights?”

“They are trained killers. Very, very tough.”

“Yeah, well so am I.”

“Captain Ledger,” he said quietly, “take your ego out of gear for a moment and look at this objectively, I-”

“I am looking at it objectively,” I cut in, “but your lack of confidence is starting to piss me off.”

“Get over it,” he said quietly and waited for another smart-mouth comment from me. I said nothing. After a moment, he continued. “The Red Knights are members of a brotherhood of assassins that emerged during the later Crusades. Over the centuries they have been tied to acts of murder, sabotage, and destruction that by today’s standards would be classified as terrorism. Very little is known about them, and much of what is recorded is questionable. History distorts reliable intel; and, much like the ninja of Japan, the knights themselves contributed to, edited, and distorted their own mythology.”

“Gosh, where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah… your friend Hugo Vox. Are we saying that this is all his scheme?”

“Unknown.”

“Who runs these knights?”

“Also unknown, though there are unsubstantiated rumors of a group called the Red Order, but so far we haven’t been able to put together a file on them. It’s even possible Red Order and Red Knights are interchangeable terms; that’s to be determined.”

“Okay,” I said dubiously, “so why haven’t I heard of these Red Knights? If they’re political it sounds like something we should be handling. What do we know about them?”

“About their organization? Next to nothing. About operatives like the one you encountered? We know bits and pieces, and none of it is good. Do not underestimate them and don’t waste time with a database search on them. The DMS has not crossed paths with them before this.” He paused. “ I have.”

“Crossed paths or crossed swords?” I asked.

He didn’t answer that.

“Did anyone tell you to run away?”

“Captain-”

“Tell me why I just ran away, Church. Sure, the knight at the hotel blindsided me and I had some trouble. I was unarmed then. Different story now; and now I’m going to be expecting the next one to be stronger and faster than the average psycho asshole with fangs. And, speaking of which, what’s with those goddamn fangs? Do they hire freaks? Are they implants of some kind, or is this some gene therapy bullshit?”

“We don’t have time for a full briefing right now,” Church said. “Continue on to the CIA safe house and when you are safe and settled we’ll have a longer conversation. In the short term, I want you to be sensible of the degree of threat these knights represent. If you encounter another one, or even suspect that you are facing one of them, do not hesitate and do not give them a single chance. Escape if you can, and if that is not an option, do not allow yourself to be drawn into another hand-to-hand confrontation.”

“Because-?”

“Because it is unlikely you would survive it.”

“Kiss my ass. I was starting to win that fight.”

“From what you told me, Captain, the knight wanted information from you,” replied Church. “That opened a window of opportunity for you. If you are unfortunate enough to encounter another Red Knight, he’s likely to be less chatty. My recommendation stands: don’t engage them. The odds are not in your favor.”

“Gee, Coach, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Mr. Church snorted. “You got lucky at the hotel, Captain. Don’t bank on your new girlfriend being on hand to save you next time.”

I will rip your throat out and drink your life.

“Jesus,” I said, “what are you trying to do here? Scare the hell out of me?”

“If that’s what it takes to drive the point home,” said Church. “You haven’t faced anything like this before. If you encounter another Red Knight, I want you to avoid contact and flee, or failing that, to terminate him immediately and with extreme prejudice.”

I bit down on a few of the things I would have liked to say to him.

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m serious, Captain.”

“Don’t worry, if I see another scary bad man I’ll run away screaming like a nine-year-old girl.”

He sighed. “See that you do. Call me from the safe house.”

The line went dead.

I looked at the phone. “Kiss my ass,” I said again.

But his words had made cold sweat break out all over my body.

Interlude One

A cold wind blew out of the desert, stirring the thousands of banners and flags that rose like a forest of silk above the camp. Hundreds of cooking fires set the night ablaze and the air was filled with laughter and songs and conversation. The fragile quiet of the night-time desert recoiled back from this rude intrusion, and overhead the stars seemed to turn shyly away from the firelight below.

Sir Guy LaRoque sat astride his horse and watched as his king, Philip II, walked toward the command tent with a phalanx of advisors around him. The whole camp was on fire with excitement. The kings of Europe were coming to the Crusade. Philip was there first, as was only right, bringing eight thousand men in one hundred ships and enough provisions to mount a countersiege against Saladin. By June, Richard the Lionheart of England would be here, and more crusaders would flood into the Holy Land in his wake. After a weary siege and inconclusive battles, the tide was turning.

The energy crackled like lightning in the air, and Sir Guy smiled. This was how it should be. This was what served God. Still smiling, Sir Guy tugged on the reins to turn his horse away from the camp, kicked it into a light canter, and set out into the darkest part of the surrounding desert. The standard-bearer, an old and trusted family servant, spurred his mount and followed. They rode in the general direction of the coast, but once there were hills between them and the camp, Sir Guy turned his horse away from the smell of salt water and headed toward the deep desert. A half an hour’s easy gallop brought them to an outcrop of rock that rose like a cathedral from the shifting sands. Sir Guy stopped on a ridge and ordered his companion to unfurl the white flag.

After a full minute, a small light appeared at the base of the tall rock. A lamp was unshielded for a moment and then covered again. Sir Guy waited until this action was performed again, and again.

“Stay here,” he told his servant. “Stay alert and sober.”

With that, Sir Guy dismounted and walked down the sloping sand toward the rock. When he was ten yards away he called out in perfect Arabic.

“ As-salamu ‘alaykum.”

“ Wa-laikum as-salam,” replied a voice from within the featureless shadows at the foot of the rock. There was movement and the lamp was once more unshielded, revealing in its glow the thin and ascetic face of a bearded Saracen. Sir Guy went forward to meet the other man and they shook hands warmly.

“Come, my friend,” said the Saracen, “I have food and a warm fire inside.”

Together they passed beyond the tapestry and entered a cave which cut nearly to the heart of the towering rock. Inside, the cave was comfortable, furnished with a rug for the floor, pillows, a low brass tray piled high with cooked meats and dried fruits, and a tall pitcher of clean water.

“You look well, Ibrahim,” said Sir Guy as he warmed his hands over the flame.

Ibrahim al-Asiri was a tall thin man with a hawk nose that had been broken and badly set, giving him a villainous look that was at odds with his role as diplomat and counselor to Salah-ed-Din Ayyubi. Like Sir Guy, his counterpart in the politics of the wars here in the Holy Land, Ibrahim was a scholar, but, unlike the Frenchman, the Arab was also a mathematician of some note and the author of complex books on engineering, geometry, and algebra.

While they ate, the two men picked up the thread of a conversation that had occupied them over many previous secret meetings.

“I am taking the matter to a priest,” said Sir Guy. “One of the Hospitallers of my order. An old friend of the family. He is a wise and subtle man, and I think he will see the logic of our plan.”

Ibrahim frowned. “What will happen if he does not agree with us? What will he do?”

“Do?” laughed Sir Guy. “He would denounce me and I would be lucky to escape being publically whipped to death. My lands and fortune would be seized and I would be excommunicated.” The Frenchman waved a hand at the expression of alarm on Ibrahim’s face. “No, no, my friend, that’s what could happen, but I do not think that it will happen. I know this man.”

“So far,” Ibrahim said, “this has all been nothing but an intellectual exercise, a discourse of a philosophical nature. Once you speak to this priest, it becomes something else.”

“I know. With the first words I say to the priest it becomes treason and heresy.”

They thought about that for several moments, each of them staring through the flickering fire at the future.

“We could turn back,” suggested Ibrahim. “Now, I mean. We could finish our meal and you could ride back to your camp and I to mine, and we could never speak of this again.”

“We could,” agreed Sir Guy.

“If we do not, then we are irrevocably set on a course that will wash the world in blood and pain and destruction from now until the ending of time.”

“Yes.”

“We must be sure.”

“I am sure,” said Sir Guy. “If you were not a heathen of a Saracen then we would drink wine together to seal the bargain.”

“And if you were not an infidel deserving of a jackal’s death we would spit on our palms and shake upon it.”

They smiled at each other.

“Let us do this, then,” proposed Sir Guy. He sat forward and took a knife and held the edge of the blade in the heat of the fire. The steel grew hot very quickly. “Since flame and steel and blood are the things with which we will prove our allegiance to God and with which we will preserve His holy name here on earth, then let it be with flame and steel and blood that we seal our agreement.”

“Our Holy Agreement,” corrected Ibrahim.

Their eyes met across the flame.

“Our Holy Agreement,” said Sir Guy.

He removed the smoking blade from the fire and opened his left hand. “The Crusades and the armies of the church are the right hand of God. We will be His left hand.”

He cocked an amused eye at Ibrahim, “And don’t tell me that your left is the hand you wipe your ass with, for I know that. No one will look there for proof of your fealty. And every time I see it I’ll laugh.”

“You are a whore’s son and the grandson of a leper,” replied Ibrahim, but he was laughing aloud as he said it.

Their laughter and smiles ebbed away as the edge of the blade turned from flat gray to a hellish red gold.

“Swear it, my brother,” said Ibrahim, nodding to the blade.

“I swear to defend the church, and to preserve it, and insure that it will endure forever. By my heart, by my hand, by my honor, and by my blood I so swear.” He set his teeth and pressed the flat of the blade into his palm. The glowing blade melted his flesh with a hiss and a curl of smoke. Sir Guy growled out in agony and then turned his cry into a ferocious prayer. “By God I swear!”

Gasping, gray-faced, he pulled the knife away and handed it to Ibrahim, then slumped back against the pillows. Ibrahim held the blade in the flames until the fading glow flared again. Then he, too, swore by his faith and on his God as he burned his promise into his skin. Then he dropped the knife into the heart of the fire where it would eventually melt into nothingness.

The smell of burning meat filled the tent.

The faces of the two diplomats were greasy with sweat.

Ibrahim held out his burned hand to his friend. “The left hand of God,” he said.

Sir Guy grunted and leaned forward, reaching out to clasp hand to hand.

“The left hand of God.”

They shook and it seemed to them that all around them the world itself trembled.

Chapter Forty-Six

“I say we pull him,” growled Aunt Sallie. She flung herself into the leather guest chair across the desk from Mr. Church. “Pull him now before he screws everything up.”

“Why?” asked Church. He sat back, his elbows on the arms of his chair, fingers steepled, eyes unreadable behind the tinted lenses of his glasses. “Beyond your general dislike of Ledger.”

“He can’t handle the knights and you damn well know it.”

“He survived one encounter.”

“Because some psycho bitch with a sniper rifle bailed him out. Pure luck.”

“Ledger is lucky, Auntie. You have to admit that.”

She snorted. “He may be, but the people around him sure as shit aren’t.”

“That’s not entirely fair.”

“Isn’t it? Grace Courtland? Marty Hanler? Sergeant Faraday? I could keep going.”

“How are any of those his fault?”

“Come on, Deke, we both know his history. Everyone who’s ever been close to him has gotten killed or hurt.”

“Again, that’s not a fair assessment.” Church took a Nilla wafer and pushed the plate across the desk. Aunt Sallie took one and snapped off a piece with her sharp white teeth; then she pointed the other half at Church. “If we’re being fair here… then you tell me how it’s fair to leave him in play? You actually like that ass clown. Do you want to see him torn apart?”

“No.”

“Do you remember what happened in Stuttgart? In Florence? In-”

“I remember, Auntie.”

“No, I think you need to refresh your mind on what happened, Deke. The knights are tougher than they ever were. Someone or something has amped them up. They tore apart an entire Mossad team. Sixteen trained agents. Dead. Drained. Is that what you want to do here? Feed your boy Ledger to those things?”

“Of course not. The Mossad team had no idea what they were up against.”

“Does Ledger?” snapped Aunt Sallie, her eyes blazing.

They regarded each other across Church’s broad desk. Aunt Sallie cocked an eyebrow.

“That sniper chick,” she said.

“Violin? What about her?”

“She’s with Arklight, isn’t she?”

“Possibly.”

“‘Possibly,’ my ass. The number of woman snipers is pretty small, and the number of those who work the Middle East is a lot smaller. You do realize that she fits a certain profile.”

“Yes,” he said, “that has occurred to me.”

“Does that mean you’re going to call the Mothers?”

“Do you think I should?”

“If one of their gals is involved in this thing, I think you damn well better. I mean… who knows the knights better than Lilith and her secret society of psycho bitches?”

Despite everything, Church smiled. “I may actually tell her you said that.”

Aunt Sallie shrugged. “I’ve called her worse things over the years.” She leaned forward, forearms resting on her knees.

Church pressed a button on his phone. “Gus? Pack a go-bag and meet me on the roof. The situation in Iran is going south on us.”

As he sat back, he caught Aunt Sallie’s cocked eyebrow.

“You going over there to hold Ledger’s hand?”

“Hardly. I want to have a face-to-face with Lilith.”

“Wear armor.”

They regarded each other for a moment, sharing without word all of the implications that were unfolding before them.

“Have you told Ledger?” asked Aunt Sallie quietly. “Have you told him what he’s really facing over there?”

Mr. Church’s eyes were flat and dead behind his tinted lenses.

“No,” he said. “He’s scared enough as it is.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

The call with Church did not exactly have the effect I was looking for. I wanted support, some fresh intel, and a clear direction. Instead he tried to scare the crap out of me-and maybe succeeded more than I’d ever let him know.

I sat on the floor of the deserted living room and checked Ghost again. He was not severely injured, but he probably needed at least a full day to shake off that Taser. So far I hadn’t given him ten minutes.

When I got to my feet and clicked my tongue for him to follow, he looked at me with huge eyes filled with equal parts hurt and disgust.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him. “We’re fugitives. No rest for the weary. Miles to go before we sleep, and all that.”

Nothing.

“Cobbler wouldn’t sissy out on me.” Cobbler was my aging house cat. He and Ghost had failed to bond. Spectacularly.

As Ghost finally hauled himself to all fours he gave me a look that could have chiseled my name on a tombstone.

I smoothed my clothes and ran my fingers through my hair, but I knew I still looked like crap. We slipped out the door and began heading toward the CIA safe house.

Even with a clean face and shirt, I looked like a street person, and I had a limping dog with blood on his fur. Not exactly the definition of nondescript, but as I walked I muttered to myself, reciting snatches of popular Persian songs and occasionally twitching my face and shoulder muscles. Even here, where suspicious characters are often questioned, no one likes to initiate contact with a disheveled man who is speaking to himself while twitching. People tend to pointedly ignore you, which is what I wanted. When anyone came too close I asked them for money, which usually guarantees that they quicken their steps while pleading poverty. A few threw blessings at me, which, hey… I took, all things considering. Twice people gave me money.

It’s a weird world.

Ghost and I kept moving.

Interlude Two

Sir Guy LaRoque waited while the little priest read through the document. They stood in a shaded courtyard of the Jerusalem hospital that was the local headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller. No other of the knights were around. Their only company was a sun-drowsy wasp that drifted through the shadows under the fig trees.

Finally the priest smiled as he sharpened his gaze on Sir Guy.

“Have you considered the consequences of what you are asking of me?”

Sir Guy half bowed. “I have. But weighed against what we stand to gain, now and in future years, I-”

The priest held up a hand to halt a repeat of the argument.

“You come here, to a sanctified and sacred hospital dedicated to the treatment of those wounded in God’s own Crusade, and ask me, a priest, to willingly break the seal of the confessional.”

“No, Father, that is not what I ask. To break the seal would be to share with another person that which was said to God through you, the confessor. I do not want to know the secrets of my brother crusaders. I would not ask such a thing. I ask only that you consider what you have heard, and to balance it against what needs to be done to protect our holy church. I ask that these insights guide you in the selection of men-righteous Christian men-who will join with us in this new crusade.”

“You propose a crusade of secrets and lies.”

“They are only lies if you disagree with our viewpoint. We have discussed this many times, Father, and each time you did agree with me. Do you say now that you lied before? Or has fear stolen away your faith in your own opinion?”

The priest turned, not quickly, not in anger, but slowly and with a calculated deliberation that was far more threatening. As he did so, his eyes seemed to change and Sir Guy nearly took a backward step. The color seemed to shift from gray to a swirl of greens and browns. It was certainly a result of the priest’s movement through the sunlight and shadow, but it was momentarily unnerving.

“Softly now,” said the priest, “for there are snares and nettles in the grass around your feet. Do not let ill-chosen words lead you to take a painful misstep.”

Sir Guy placed a hand over his heart and bowed again. A deeper bow this time, held longer, the demonstration of apology and humility. “Have I offended, Father, then I am truly sorry. Before God and your holiness, I beg forgiveness for rude and rash words, poorly chosen and hastily spoken.”

He felt a touch on his head. The priest’s thin fingers caressed the brown curls that twisted out from under the silk cap.

“Peace, my son,” murmured the priest. “Look at me.”

Sir Guy slowly straightened, almost afraid to see that unnatural swirl of colors in the cleric’s eyes, but what he saw was the same golden brown he had known for years.

“Thank you, Father.”

“My son… this undertaking… it is with the consent and cooperation of the infidel and heretic Ibrahim al-Asiri? Cousin and private advisor to Saladin, enemy of God? You have made a preliminary bargain with a representative of the Antichrist on earth?”

“He is a Saracen, to be sure, but-”

“Yes or no, my friend?” asked the priest. “Did you enter into an agreement with Ibrahim al-Asiri?”

“I did. In the name of God and for my love of the Church, I did.”

The priest took his hand and patted it. “I just wanted you to say it aloud. Plain and not couched in the twisted language of diplomacy which, I must admit, often sounds like the mutterings of the devil. Tell me the truth, Sir Guy, for much hangs on it. If I were to say no-if I threatened to do the terrible things that we both know I can do and indeed should do to a man who has brought this to me and asked of me what you have asked-would you be willing to kill me?”

Sir Guy said nothing.

“Speak now or I will call the guards.”

“Yes,” croaked the diplomat, though he knew that he could never do such a thing. He could kill an uncle or brother before he killed a priest.

“Then tell me one more thing. If you escaped; if you fled this hospital and the city, if you took a boat to Spain or some other port, if you changed your name and lived forever in hiding… would you still want this plan of yours to go forward? Does the substance of this agreement matter more to you than titles, land, wealth, or your own name? Does this agreement matter more to you than your own life?”

“Yes,” Sir Guy said again. His throat felt like it was filled with shards of broken pottery.

The priest stepped closer, his face as severe as one of the saints of antiquity. “If I were to call my guards in here and have them strike you down and cut off your head and scatter the worthless pieces of your body to the vultures… would you even then want this agreement to move forward?”

Tears broke from Sir Guy’s eyes and he buckled slowly to his knees. He drew his sword and let it clatter to the flagstones. His dagger clanged as he dropped that across the sword. Sir Guy bowed his head.

“Yes,” he said in a voice that was filled with passion but without hope.

The tears dropped from his face onto the toe of the priest’s shoe. A moment later the priest raised his foot and touched the tearstained toe to the tip of the dagger. It lay almost parallel to the sword, but the priest nudged it slowly until it sat crosswise so that the dagger formed the bar of a cross. Or the hilt of a sword. How often Sir Guy had noticed how similar cross and sword were to one another.

“Look at me.”

Sir Guy raised his eyes and saw that the priest was smiling. It was not a nice smile. It was like looking at a snake smile, and as his seamed faced wrinkled with the smile, the priest’s eyes once more seemed to be as much green as brown. Like the mottled skin of a toad.

“Swear to me, Guy LaRoque, knight of the Sacred Order of Hospitallers. Swear that you will live according to this agreement, now and for all of the days of your life. Swear that you will do everything in your power-everything that your faith and your imagination and your will demands-to insure that the substance of this agreement comes to pass. Swear that to me, now, on your knees, before God.”

Sir Guy bent forward and caught a fold of the priest’s robe and kissed the hem. “I swear,” he said, the words as much a vow as a plea. “I swear before God, to the end of the world and the redemption of my sinner’s soul… I swear.”

“Then rise, Sir Guy LaRoque, knight of the holy Hospital of Jerusalem, protector of the Holy Land, soldier of God. I bless you and sanctify this Holy Agreement and all of its precious secrets. I bless it and God blesses it. Amen.”

Sir Guy wept and kissed the priest’s hem again before he climbed to his feet. “Thank you, Father. Thank you!”

The priest waved away the gratitude and the tears.

“What do you call this crusade of yours-of ours — my son?”

“In truth I have not yet thought of a fitting title. Ibrahim has already given his order a special name. The Tariqa. It is the Sufi word for ‘the path.’ He will be its first Murshid, its first guide along that path.”

The old priest nodded. “We will have to do the same, for you know that you cannot use the name of the Sacred Order of Hospitallers for this cause.”

“I confess that I’ve come up dry on that and-”

“ Ordo Ruber,” said the priest.

“Father?”

“The Red Order. We are born in the blood of Christ, are we not? And it is the blood of sacrifices and martyrs that shall sanctify our cause.”

Sir Guy murmured the name, feeling how the words and all of their many possible meanings fit in his mouth. “Yes,” he said. “That is perfect. The Red Order.”

They stopped in the archway, both of them bathed in purple shadows. Sir Guy’s heart was swelling with love and gratitude. He took the priest’s hand, bent and kissed the blood red ruby of his ring.

“Thank you,” he said. “I thank you with all my heart, Father Nicodemus.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

Aunt Sallie and Church were still in his office when the phone rang with an overseas call. “Well, well,” he said and showed the display to Aunt Sallie.

Auntie smiled like a happy cat in a canary store. “This should be interesting as all hell.”

Church activated the scrambler and speaker.

Without preamble, Lilith demanded, “Have you talked to your agent, Ledger, today?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that he met with Jalil Rasouli?”

“Yes.”

“Is he on or off the leash?”

“He has my trust.”

“Okay. Good to know, I suppose,” she said. Her tone was icy and scalpel sharp. “Word is that Rasouli gave something to Ledger. Care to tell me what it was?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“Because I think Rasouli is playing a game.”

“And that would be different from his normal behavior in what way?”

“Don’t try to be cute,” Lilith said tersely. “Do you know that the new Scriptor of the Red Order is trying to recruit Rasouli as the new Murshid of the Tariqa?”

Church cocked an eyebrow at Aunt Sallie. She shook her head and began tapping keys on the MindReader interface.

“I was not aware of that,” admitted Church. “Until today the Order has been off the radar since Baghdad. I am rather surprised to learn that they are active again.”

“They never really stopped. The new Scriptor-Charles, the last of the LaRoques-took over after we took his father off the board.”

“So that was you.”

Lilith ignored that. “The Order slowed down for a bit until they could build a list of candidates for a new Murshid. Rasouli’s been on the top of that list for a couple of years now.”

Aunt Sallie signaled to Church to look at the information on her monitor. Church nodded.

“It’s my understanding that Charles LaRoque has been treated for a variety of personality disorders since boyhood,” said Church. “Paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychosis. A handful of others. How is he able to run an organization as sophisticated as the Order?”

“The priest.”

“Priest?”

“The priest,” she said again, emphasizing the word.

“Lilith, you never mentioned a priest to me. Let’s remember that I’ve asked you many times for a complete history of the Red Order and each time you’ve refused. Actually, each time you never responded at all. So, again I ask, which priest? Who is he?”

There was a pause and when Lilith spoke again her tone changed. Less harsh, more cautious. “When Sir Guy LaRoque founded the Red Order he did so with the blessing of a priest from the Knights Hospitaller. Ever since then, each Scriptor has had a priest as his spiritual advisor.”

“And the current priest is part of the Order? And he is managing Charles LaRoque even though the young man is mentally unstable? That suggests that it is the priest who is the de facto head of the Red Order.”

“Yes.”

“Who is this priest?”

“Arklight has been trying to figure that out for a long time,” said Lilith. “There are some anomalies in his file.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact that when we compare a four-month-old surveillance photo of him it is a perfect match to a photo from 1936 that was part of some church records recovered after the Second World War.”

“There are a number of ways to doctor a-”

“And both photos match paintings hanging in churches in northern Italy. One from 1897 and one from 1633.”

Aunt Sallie mouthed the words “Oh shit.”

“We also have reliable visual confirmation from an agent in Baghdad that the current priest died in the bombing along with Charles’s grandfather and the Tariqa council.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything, St. Germaine.”

“I prefer ‘Church’ these days. Or ‘Deacon,’ that still works. I don’t really have a connection to ‘St. Germaine’ anymore. I’m sure we’re both adult enough to understand why.”

“Why not for once simply use your real name?” groused Lilith.

Church’s voice was very cold. “Do you really want to open that door? There are other skeletons in the same closet.”

Eventually Lilith said, “No.”

“Will you give me the name of the current priest? And the names of any of the others you know to have been associated with the Red Order?”

“You still don’t get it,” said Lilith. “There is only one name.”

“They… all adopt the same name?”

“That’s one theory.”

Church cocked his eyebrow at Aunt Sallie, who parked a haunch on the edge of the table and stared at him over the lenses of her granny glasses.

“Give me the name.”

Lilith said, “Father Nicodemus.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

Ghost and I walked quickly through five or six streets lined with houses that had been left to crumble beneath the relentless Iranian sun. I saw a single sign with a notice about rezoning and impending construction, but it was at least five years old. The only life we encountered there were starving dogs who fled from Ghost’s warning growls, and a single vulture who sat on a telephone pole that had long ago been stripped of its wires. The vulture’s ugly, naked head swiveled slowly on its scrawny neck, watching us as we walked past.

“Don’t get any ideas,” I warned the scavenger, and gave him an evil squint that entirely failed to impress him.

A few blocks later we reentered a residential quarter where people still lived, though even here there was a sense of life fading to dust. I knew from my travels that the typical meal in an Iranian home was unleavened bread and lentils. That’s it. Animal protein was a rarity. I wanted to sneer about it and speculate on how often the ayatollahs had lamb or chicken; but I’m from Baltimore. I’ve seen American poverty at its worst, and as the richest nation on earth we’re the last ones who should throw stones about allowing poverty and starvation within our own borders.

There were a handful of cars, mostly junkers that were held together by rust and need. But one car caught my eye. It was also beat up but it didn’t labor to make it down the block; and I saw it three times. Twice on streets that paralleled the one I was on, and once idling at a light a block ahead. My route may have been random, but I paid close attention to cars and people; and one of the tricks is looking down a cross street when you reach a corner to see what cars are moving along at your pace a block or two over.

Spotting the same car three times could have been a coincidence. Kim Kardashian’s boobs could be real, too, and that’s about as likely.

When I got to the next block, I cut through an alley, running only as fast as Ghost could manage. At the end of the alley, I went through a couple of backyards and then a side yard which took me back to the street just as the little sedan drove past. I was in deep shadows and the driver was looking slowly side to side to check the faces of pedestrians on a moderately busy market street.

The driver was a woman.

I could not tell much because she wore a chador, but her eyes were intelligent, intense and, except for heavy makeup, they did not look even remotely Middle Eastern. Northern Italian at best.

“Violin,” I said, and I knew that I was right. My own Sniping Beauty. And as I murmured her name she turned in my direction, but I was in shadows and the traffic gave her no room to stop.

She could not have heard me. No way.

I opened my cell phone and called Bug, giving him the make, model, and license plate number of Violin’s car.

“Whoa!” Bug said as soon as he ran it. “This is really weird. I got a screen pop-up that says all inquiries for this plate number are to be directed internally. Here, I mean. The DMS. The pop-up is initialed D.”

D. For Deacon.

Church.

“Put him on the line,” I demanded.

“I can’t,” said Bug, “he’s on a conference call with somebody overseas. Don’t know who and he’s marked his line for ‘no intrusion.’”

“Then make goddamn sure I’m his next call,” I growled, and hung up.

Violin’s car was gone by the time I stepped out of the alley with Ghost lumbering along beside me. A few people threw me annoyed looks. Iran had weird rules about dogs on the street. I ignored them.

As we picked our way through the crowds of shoppers, I kept one eye on the cars, watching to see if Violin circled back. Then I froze. Another car drifted along, and the driver, much like Violin, was looking side to side to scan the pedestrians. It wasn’t my guardian angel. It was a man, and when he turned my way I saw a gaunt face and red rat eyes staring through the glass.

A Red Knight.

Christ.

I darted out of the flow of traffic and stood in the dense shadows under the broad awning of a big vegetable stand. The car rolled along, and the head moved back and forth, and I held my breath. Then it was gone in the long flow of traffic that vanished into the heat haze. He hadn’t spotted me.

“Sheeez,” I breathed.

I was becoming increasingly paranoid. It felt like there was nowhere to go, no place, not even a street corner, where I could catch my breath. It was getting hard to catch my breath and that had nothing to do with the relentless heat.

The vegetable seller glanced at me and offered a handful of figs. I shook my head, and with a word to Ghost, turned and headed a different way. We needed to get off the street right now. The CIA safe house was close.

We kept our heads down and melted into the crowd.

Interlude Three

Sir Guy LaRoque and Father Nicodemus sat at the end of a long rectangular table made from a massive and ornate wooden door that had once hung in a Jewish temple. The temple was now in ashes, its treasures parceled out among the priests and senior knights of the Hospitallers.

There were a dozen seats at the table. Nine knights sat there, and the rest were minor priests of Nicodemus’s choosing. Each of them had sworn the same oaths, each had sealed their oaths with the tip of a heated knife blade.

Without looking up, Nicodemus said, “Do you know this story, Sir Guy? The binding of Isaac?”

The Frenchman hedged. “Perhaps not as well as I should-”

Nicodemus waved away the excuse with a gentle movement of his hand. “There are valuable lessons in the Bible’s older books.” He tapped the carving of Abraham with a long fingernail. “This one in particular. Abraham, a holy man, was commanded by God to bring his son to Mount Moriah, and there to build a sacrificial altar and sacrifice Isaac upon it. Abraham did as he was told. He built the altar and bound his son to it, drew his knife, and was ready-despite his breaking heart-to kill Isaac to prove his devotion to God. However, before the knife could plunge down, an angel appeared and stayed his hand, directing him to sacrifice a nearby ram instead.”

As he spoke the men seated around the table grew quiet so they could hear the story. A few stood to better see the carving. Nicodemus nodded approval.

“The whole drama,” he continued, “had been staged to force Abraham to prove beyond question his steadfast devotion to God.”

Two of the priests murmured “Amen,” which was picked up and echoed by the knights. However Nicodemus’s next words silenced them. “Or so Abraham told everyone.”

He looked at the men, each in turn, and the molten gold color of his eyes seemed to swirl with shadows. “Personally, I have sometimes doubted whether the story was fairly reported. After all, except for the boy, who was traumatized and confused, there were no credible witnesses.” No one said a word. No one dared. “The power of the story is immeasurable. Because of it Abraham became the father of the Israelites, the father of us all in many ways. He became a leader whose right to lead was bestowed upon him by God. Directly by God. And why? Because of the power of his devotion, a devotion so steadfast that he would have slaughtered his own son.”

The others nodded but said nothing.

“As I sat waiting for our brotherhood to gather,” continued the priest, “I pondered this story, as I have oftentimes pondered it. We know firsthand that the histories being written about our Crusades are often at odds with the facts, but seldom at odds with the truth.” He paused, eyes intense. “With the most useful version of the truth.”

A wealthy knight halfway down the table said, “Surely, Father, there is only one truth. Everything else is…”

His voice trailed off as Nicodemus leaned forward. “Doesn’t that depend on who is telling that truth, and who is listening?” Nicodemus allowed them to ponder that. “I have long ago accepted that history of any kind may be only a version told to suit the listener and serve the teller. Like the story of Abraham and Isaac. While we can understand and fully appreciate the effect of this story upon all of the generations that followed, we liberated thinkers are now called to look at the actual events. We can wonder what Abraham’s true feelings were for Isaac. He could as easily have despised the boy. Or found him bland and uninteresting. Or, if-as some church scholars insist-Isaac was a grown man in his thirties at the time of the sacrifice, then the whole event might have been concocted by father and son. Certainly the result was that their line became the bloodline of the Jews. To tell you the truth, I rather like the idea that it was an agreement between them. It shows high intelligence and careful planning and demonstrates, to us in particular, the power that can be harvested from such courses.”

“But you say that it might all be a lie,” insisted the youngest man at the table, a priest who was the brother of a powerful knight.

“Yes,” agreed Nicodemus, “a lie, but a lie with a purpose. A lie that guided the course of a nation, shaped the future of a people. A lie that, through the blood and history of the Jews, allowed for Christianity and Islam to be born into this world.”

Sir Guy tapped the table with his forefinger. “Yes!” he said emphatically. “And there are two things that are most important about that lie. First, is that it was a lie. That is crucial to know. And the second thing is that no one else knows that it’s a lie. Even you, Father Nicodemus, cannot and do not know that it was a lie. If proof ever existed it was either hidden away or erased, which is a very good thing to do with such dangerous truths.”

The men agreed and a few beat their fists.

Nicodemus smiled his approval.

“And what dangerous and important truths rest with us,” he said softly. “Tell me, my brothers… how will we write them into the pages of history?”

Chapter Fifty

“Nicodemus?” repeated Church. “That’s very interesting. Is that a first or last name?”

“It’s all we have,” said Lilith. The speakers on Church’s phone were of the best quality, and it sounded like Lilith was in the room with them.

“There have been priests named Nicodemus associated with the Red Order for eight hundred years?”

“Yes.”

“And as far as you can determine they all look similar?”

“Disturbingly so.”

Church glanced at Aunt Sallie, who nodded.

“Lilith, I just e-mailed you an image file. Take a look at it and let me know if this man is similar in appearance to the priest currently working with LaRoque.”

“Opening it now,” said Lilith. She made a sharp, disgusted sound. “Yes, that’s him. Damn it, if you already know about him why are you grilling me on-”

“We did not know about the priest,” interrupted Church. “This photo is from a supermax prison in Pennsylvania, here in the States.”

“This man was in prison?”

“Yes. He was arrested at the scene of a multiple murder in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania and later convicted of the murders. The case was built on strong circumstantial evidence but there were no other suspects and he offered no defense.”

“This looks exactly like the priest. Exactly. What is his name?”

“Nicodemus.”

“When was this? When was he arrested?”

“1996.”

“When was he released?”

“Lilith,” said Church slowly, “he was not released. He was incarcerated at Graterford Prison until December of last year, at which point he apparently escaped.”

“Then it can’t be the same man. We have pictures of him from just before the air strike on the presidential palace in Baghdad on March 19, 2003. That’s when the old Murshid and the Tariqa high council were killed, along with the current Scriptor’s grandfather. So, your man would have been in prison.”

“Yes,” said Church softly. “Odd, isn’t it.” He did not phrase it as a question.

“One of us is working with bad intel,” growled Lilith, “and I really doubt it’s us. Arklight isn’t-”

“Please,” cut in Church. “No need to sell me on Arklight’s capabilities. But there’s something more about the prisoner Nicodemus. He was involved in the Seven Kings affair last year. The bombings and other attacks that were part of the Ten Plagues Initiative.”

“Hugo Vox?”

“Yes.”

“Mother of God.”

“Yes.”

“Vox knew most of the men who were killed in the Baghdad bombing. He’s known the LaRoques all his life.”

“I-didn’t know that,” admitted Church.

Lilith snorted. “You need better sources.”

“The DMS often relies on the goodwill of its allies and the exchange of crucial intelligence. Tell, me… how is Oracle working out for you?”

The only reply from Lilith was a stony silence.

Aunt Sallie mouthed the words, “Stop dicking around and play the card.”

Church sighed and nodded. “Lilith, when I gave you the Oracle system it was with the understanding that it be used to help your cause, and to provide occasional support for my operations.”

“That was long before you built the DMS. I have no standing agreement with the Americans.”

“You have an agreement with me,” Church said quietly. “And with Aunt Sallie.”

“Is she listening?” demanded Lilith.

“Yes.”

“Bitch.”

Aunt Sallie grinned, but said nothing.

“This conversation has made it abundantly clear,” said Church, “that you have information that is likely crucial to one of our ongoing operations. I have never used MindReader to intrude into Oracle, and I would prefer not to.”

The threat hung in the air.

“No. You tell me what’s going on. Why is your man Ledger taking meetings with Jalil Rasouli.”

“I want your word that this will be a fair and free exchange, Lilith. No games, okay?”

Instead of answering the question, Lilith said, “The shooter tracking Captain Ledger is my daughter.”

Church sat back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment.

“You put her in the field?”

“Of course I put her in the field. That’s what she has trained for.”

“Have you told her?” asked Church. “Does she know who her father is?”

Lilith took a moment, and when she spoke her voice was bitter. “She knows. Telling her was the cruelest thing I have ever done.” She paused. “But I don’t need to tell you about breaking a daughter’s heart, do I?”

Church sighed again. “That’s unkind, Lilith. I do what I do to protect Circe from who and what I am.”

“So, she doesn’t know who her father is?”

“She knows enough,” said Church. “I don’t see any benefit in doing her any additional harm.”

Lilith snorted. “And now she works for you. Do your people know that she’s your daughter?”

“Only those who need to know,” he said. “And that topic is closed.”

“Very well,” said Lilith. “Now tell me about Ledger and Rasouli. What was on that flash drive?”

Church told her.

Chapter Fifty-One

“Your son is dead, Father,” said Albion, the eleventh of Grigor’s sons. “My brother is dead.”

Those were the words that still burned in Grigor’s mind.

Your son is dead.

Delos. The sixth of his sons to be born without genetic flaw. The sixth to receive Dr. Hasbrouck’s genetic therapy.

Delos. Grigor’s pride. One of his most trusted warriors. One of the elite even among the Red Knights.

His son.

His son was dead.

Grigor’s rage was a terrible thing, but it was not evident. The storms that broke and howled were not physical things, they could not be felt or seen. There was no outward sign of it. Not unless someone could look into the bottomless crimson depths of his eyes.

Even though he wanted so badly to shriek out his fury, to burst listening ears with his cries, he sat in stillness.

LaRoque had made him send one of his sons to his death.

A knight.

One of the pure ones.

He sat on his throne there in the bottomless darkness and as the waves of pain washed over him, he endured them. Welcomed them. Let them feed the awful fires that burned in his heart. And there, deep down in his personal darkness, those flames grew hotter and more terrible still.

Interlude Four

The three monks pushed the pilgrims toward the rock wall as the riders swept down the hill toward them. The ancient fort was little more than fragments of walls and an overgrown courtyard filled with palm trees whose trunks had burst upward through cracked flagstones. It was poor cover, but it was better than standing out here on the sand, waiting for the Saracens to sweep down and slaughter them.

Most of the pilgrims ran, their prayers strangled from their throats by fear. A few of the more devout wavered, caught between their belief that God would protect them and the fear that He might not chose to do so today. One old man stood his ground and held a cross up and out toward the approaching riders as if that was a shield that could turn any sword. His white beard fluttered in the hot wind.

“Go, go! ” yelled Brother Julius, pushing his shoulder. The old man twisted away from the monk.

“No! I shall not move one inch from the path to Holy Jerusalem, and neither devils nor demons nor the swords of the infidels will-”

His words were struck to silence as a crossbow bolt buried itself to the fletching in his throat. The old pilgrim staggered backward a step, touching his fingers to the line of hot blood that ran down his chest. The sheer impossibility of his own death, of his mortality in the presence of God’s grace here on the pilgrims’ road, tethered him for a moment to life. His mouth formed the word “No.” But the only sound that issued from his throat was the wet gurgle.

The old man sagged to his knees and his head slumped forward but he did not fall over, and Brother Julius marveled at the horror and beauty of it all: the devout traveler ending his pilgrimage in a posture of supplication.

More quarrels hissed through the air and Brother Julius wheeled as the caravan horses began to scream when the steel-headed missiles tore into their flesh. One reared high and lashed out, striking a nun on the cheek and snapping her neck with a dry-stick crack.

Brother Julius ran then. The other pilgrims were clambering over the ruins of the old fort as arrows struck sparks from the broken stone. The riders-a dozen Saracens in billowing desert cloaks-rode toward them like the horsemen of Saint John. They yipped and yelled and laughed as they fired their last volley of quarrels and then they hooked their crossbows over their saddle horns and drew their swords with a rippling wave of silver.

Brother Julius tried to leap over a fallen pear tree, and the skeletal fingers of a branch snagged the hem of his robe. The cloth caught fast and Julius fell flat on his face with a whooomph! Sand puffed up, filling his nose and mouth. He rolled onto his side, gagging and coughing.

Behind him he heard shrill screams and the sound of pain-filled voices pleading to God even as sword blades cut into them. Brother Julius closed his eyes and tried to mutter a prayer between fits of coughing. Soon the screams stopped but the dull-wet sound of steel on flesh continued for almost a full minute.

Then there was silence.

Brother Julius tried to crawl away, but he heard the crunch of a foot on the sand beside his head and he looked up into the face of one of the killers. The man had dark eyes and black hair that fluttered in the breeze. He had a thin mustache and a spiked beard on the point of his chin. He was not smiling; instead a look of sadness was painted over his features. And his face… there was something terribly wrong about his face.

“Make your peace with God,” said the killer.

The clothes were Saracen, as were the armor and fittings. Even the decorations on the horse that stood nickering behind him were of Saracen make. But the man spoke in French.

“W-why… why are you doing this?” demanded the monk. “I don’t understand. For the love of God- why? ”

The killer raised his sword. “It is for the love of God that we do this. And may God have mercy on all our souls.”

The sword flashed downward and Brother Julius felt himself detaching from the heat and the sand and his own flesh. He felt himself falling into darkness, into mystery.

The swordsman placed a foot on the monk’s chest and pulled, tearing his blade free from where it had wedged deep in the bone. Then he dropped the weapon on the sand by the monk.

He turned and looked at his companions. Two of them were busy with the task of cutting off the heads of the pilgrims. They were laughing as they worked, tossing the heads like children playing with toys.

“Stop it!” growled the swordsman, and the men froze in place, their smiles disintegrating from their faces, their eyes instantly ashamed. He plucked at his robe with disgust. “Do you wear these and then forget who you are?”

Then two men glanced at each other, and then bowed deeply to the swordsman.

“Forgive foolish sinners, brother,” said one.

The other, too ashamed to speak, merely nodded.

The swordsman walked over to them and placed his hands on their shoulders. The other warriors sat on their horses, chins buried on their chests, looking troubled and sad and weary.

“My brothers,” said the swordsman, “battle is like strong wine even to the best of us. We become drunk on it, and we must guard against that. When we are done, I invite you all to join me in prayers to God in which we will ask for forgiveness of our sins and guidance for all things to come.”

The men nodded. The swordsman turned to the men on the horses. They too nodded.

“Then let us be about our task with the reverence to which it is due.”

No one spoke, but they nodded again and set to work.

Without laughter or games they collected the heads of the pilgrims and stacked them into a mound in the middle of the pilgrims’ road. Another caravan of the faithful was due along this path in less than half a day. They set the head of Brother Julius atop the pile. They placed a ring of hands around the mound, and in each hand they placed a holy cross. Then the men formed a circle around the mound and fished for the fittings of their codpieces. Without meeting each other’s eyes, they pulled out their penises and urinated on the mound, on the hands, and even on the crosses.

Last of all, the swordsman used a sharp stick to write a curse against all crusaders in the hard-packed dirt by the ruins. He concluded it with a description of how Pope Innocent III sodomized young boys and sheep. It was a filthy description, but it looked almost elegant when written in the flowing Arabic script.

The swordsman was weeping as he flung the stick away from him as if it was covered in offal. He stripped off his Saracen robes and folded them into a tight bundle before shoving them roughly into a saddle bag. He stood for a moment letting the wind dry the sweat-heavy dark brown hooded cape with a white cross embroidered on the left shoulder. The cross was not the plain outline of long post and short crosspiece, but was instead made to look like a dagger laid across a longsword, with both overlaying a red circle. The other men also shed their disguises to stand revealed. They stood in a circle around the devastation they had caused, and each of them bowed their heads in prayer.

“God forgive us,” murmured the swordsman, leading the prayer. “And God grant that the pilgrims see and understand what they must understand.”

“Amen,” said each of the gathered men, and they said it gravely and with honesty.

With that, Sir Guy LaRoque turned away and walked with a heavy heart toward his horse. The trustworthy men of the Red Order of the Knights Hospitaller followed.

It had begun.

Chapter Fifty-Two

The big screen above Circe’s MindReader console flashed white and then was filled by the bland face of Mr. Church. Rudy saw Circe’s posture immediately stiffen and the muscles at the corners of her jaw tightened. He wondered if Church noticed it too. And if so, did he care.

“Let’s jump right in,” said Church. “Aunt Sallie tells me that you have problems with the content of the drive. Tell me.”

“First,” interrupted Rudy, “Is Joe okay?”

“He says so,” said Church.

“Yes, but is he?”

“I haven’t had time to personally give him a physical, Dr. Sanchez.”

Rudy held his ground. “I expect a more complete answer as soon as possible.”

“Noted,” Church said with a small twitch of his mouth.

“What do we know about the nukes?” said Circe.

Church smiled faintly. “Based on the photos Rasouli provided, they appear to be Teller-Ulams. We’re running extensive searches through intelligence agencies in thirty countries to see if we can get a line on who might have built them.”

“Can’t a person simply go online and download instructions for making them?” asked Rudy.

“You watch too many movies, Doctor. These are sophisticated and complex machines, and it takes a great deal of skill, the proper equipment, and genuine experts to do it right. From the photos it’s clear that the casings are commercially manufactured, or rather were during the Cold War. These casings are late 1980s, and less than five hundred of this design were made.”

“Five hundred?” echoed Rudy.

“A conservative estimate places the number of active nukes in the world at eight thousand,” said Circe.

“That estimate is very conservative,” said Church. “We know who bought this model openly or through standard military appropriations. We have decades of intelligence and, in some cases, mutual sharing of information. My guess is that we will find that most or all of those devices will be accounted for: still active, mothballed, or dismantled and the parts tracked. The problem is complicated by the fact that fifty-six of these devices were in the Republic of Kazakhstan, and after it became separated from Russia, we have not been able to verify the location or disposition of a third of those devices. This has become a typical, though increasingly frightening, state of affairs since the end of the Cold War.”

“There’s a second problem,” added Circe. “Most of the superpowers have many more devices than have ever appeared on inventories, because they do not want them counted. Nuclear arms limitations agreements, as well intentioned as they are, have driven some countries into policies of secrecy that are truly frightening.”

“So what does that mean for us?” asked Rudy. “In this case, I mean?”

“It should give us a few leads but we can’t count on it taking us directly to a source,” replied Circe. “Or to a buyer, if these things are black market items.”

“Exactly.” Church selected a Nilla wafer but did not take a bite. “This might-and I do mean might — help us eventually find the source of the bombs, but I’m not optimistic about that leading us to where all of the bombs currently are. We still only have probable locations on the first four. That kind of ferret work is time-consuming, and I doubt we have that kind of time. In the short term I am positioning our teams to move in and attempt to seize control of them and de-arm them.”

The word “attempt” hung in the air like a bad smell.

“And if we can’t?” asked Rudy.

“I have a number of experts working on developing various practical scenarios for how this could play out, including, unfortunately, a worst-case scenario.”

“Worst-case meaning what?” asked Rudy. “Tell me that your concern is the human population of the region and not the oil fields.”

Church said nothing, and his eyes were invisible behind his tinted glasses, but Rudy felt the impact of his stare.

“ Lo siento,” Rudy said, and placed his hand over his heart and half bowed.

Church shook his head to erase the gaffe from the conversation. He turned to focus on Circe. “How are you coming along with a list of potential instigators?”

She sighed and shook her head. “We simply don’t have enough information to go on. We need to know more than we do or we’re shooting in the dark.”

“I agree,” said Church, nodding. “Now give me what you have.”

Circe told him about the concerns she and Bug had with the “damage” to the flash drive.

“I think we can all agree that Rasouli doctored it,” Church said with a cold little smile. “What else?”

“The Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex, ” said Rudy. “We’ve made some progress there.” They told him about the Voynich manuscript.

“Yes,” Church said, nodding. “I’ve heard of it. Have you been able to determine what it is, though? Voynich or the Book of Shadows?”

“Not so far,” admitted Circe. “I’ve been going through the research done at Yale, at U of P, and elsewhere, but it’s all theories. No one has cracked it yet.”

“And those two extra pages?”

Circe shrugged. “Dead end, so far.”

“What about the other book, the Saladin Codex? It’s my understanding that it’s an annotation and attempted refutation of Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-gabr wa’l-muqabala. Does that suggest anything?”

Circe nodded, translating the name slowly, tasting the words. “‘The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.’ Completion and balancing. Interesting.”

“I thought so, too,” said Church.

Rudy did not see the connection. “What does that suggest?”

“In terms of symbolism, it suggests a number of things,” said Circe. “The desire for a return to order. Or, in different terms, to the ‘correct’ and precise way things should be. In the current Middle East situation, there are several clashing interpretations for the ‘way things should be.’ The Jews say the Holy Land is theirs, and they can make a good argument for it, from their perspective based on the length of time during which they occupied those lands, the whole ‘chosen people’ thing. Then there’s the Christians who believe that the Holy Lands rightfully passed to them with the birth and, more significantly, the trial, execution, and resurrection of Jesus. Some groups actively believe that the Jews forfeited any rights to those lands when they brought Jesus to Pilate for trial.” She took a breath. “And Islam, though a comparatively younger religion, believes that God specifically handed over the lease for those lands to them through Mohammed. Since there have been Arab peoples there for thousands of years, they, too, can make a good claim for possession.”

“Not to mention the tensions ignited when the nation of Israel was founded,” said Church. “And the deepening crisis when oil was discovered under the sands.”

“Which brings in Europe and America,” said Rudy.

“And Asia. China and Japan are major clients of OPEC.”

“Balance,” mused Rudy sourly. “What about completion?”

“In this context,” said Church, “I find the word deeply troubling. It suggests an end to things. An endgame, perhaps.”

“Nukes would accomplish that,” said Circe.

“How?” asked Rudy. “Beyond simply blowing things up.”

“You know the saying ‘fire purifies’?” asked Circe. “If the oil fields were destroyed and the land laid waste by radiation, there could be no further conflict over there.”

“What are we discussing here?” asked Rudy with a crooked smile. “A doomsday cult?”

Circe wasn’t smiling.

“ Madre de Dios,” breathed Rudy.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Once we were past the markets, the streets became empty and quiet. No human or car traffic. No sign of Violin, no sign of the Red Knight, but I didn’t like the vibe. The atmosphere was supercharged with tension. I knew that a lot of it was nerves. This whole thing was freaking me out. Truly and deeply.

Haven lay right up the street, though, and I was already starting to breathe easier.

The best safe houses were run by the CIA. They’d been at this longer and they spent a lot of time developing teams to run and oversee the locations. The one Ghost and I headed to was at the fringe of a garment district, with an open lot on one side and a hardware store that was closed on the other. A “For Sale” sign was hung in the window of the store, and I suspected the Company owned that as well.

The safe house was occupied by husband and wife agents. They were a real married couple recruited years ago. Taraneh and Arastoo Mouradipour. Midthirties. His cover was a textile salesman, and she was floor manager for a small factory that made children’s clothes.

Ghost and I walked past the house twice, once from across the street heading west, then on the same side as the house going east. Everything looked normal and quiet. A ten-year-old blue Paykan was parked outside, its paint job faded by sand and heat, several rust spots coated with primer. The only other vehicles in the area were a pair of white vans parked in the lot of a telephone installation company a few blocks away.

We walked all the way around the block and then cut down the alley that led to the open lot. I walked along the side of the house. Back door and side windows were intact. Everything looked calm, which is exactly what I wanted to see. Calm sounded pretty good to me. I needed a bath, food, a first aid kit and a chance to make a private call to Church. There was so much I needed to tell him.

When we reached the front of the house I went to the door and knocked.

Ghost, who was still sluggish, flopped down on the step and looked like he was about to go to sleep. I was getting worried about him. There was no way to tell how much damage the Taser had done, but Ghost was definitely not himself; his senses were clearly dulled and his energy almost bottomed out.

There was no immediate answer. I knocked again.

The protocol was to knock no more than three times. After that you walk away and try another safe house. I didn’t want to walk into another house filled with blood and death, so I was willing to split if this didn’t play out. The next closest was a convenience store half a mile from here. However, I doubted Ghost had that much energy in him. I could sympathize. That goon in the hotel had really rung my chimes and now that the adrenaline was wearing off I could feel it.

I was about to knock a final time when I heard the lock click. The door opened a half inch and I saw a woman’s eye peer at me through the crack.

“Yes?” she asked.

“May I speak with Mr. Pourali?”

That was the current code, and it changed every few days.

“Who is calling?” she asked, right on cue.

“Mr. Hosseini.”

“Please come in,” she said, stepping back and pulling open the door.

I clicked my tongue for Ghost, who jerked awake and scrambled to his feet. He followed me inside.

“Thank you,” I said to the woman as she closed the door.

Ghost froze in place and let out a single sharp bark of warning, which was two seconds too late.

The woman produced a small black automatic from under her robes and pointed it at my face.

Chapter Fifty-Four

“Inside or I’ll kill you where you stand,” she snapped, and she said it in English. Not good English, but good enough.

Ghost was trembling, caught between the impulses of his instincts and his training. I was pack leader and I hadn’t given the command to hit.

“January,” I said. It was today’s clarification code word. If this was all a big mistake then the code word would dial everything back to normal.

She said, “Shut up.”

Not the code reply I was hoping for.

I heard a floorboard creak behind me, and Ghost growled in time to warn me… but not in time to protect himself. As I whirled two men rushed at me through the doorway to the living room. They were not Red Knights, but that was the only consolation. The first threw a handful of powder in my face, blinding and gagging me; the other hurled a weighted metal-mesh net over Ghost. On another day, Ghost would have dodged the net and torn the man’s throat out, but the Taser had blunted all of his edge. Ghost cringed, caught in fear and indecision, and the net slapped down around him. He howled in anger, thrashing and twisting to get away from it, but his struggles only wrapped the thing around him. He tripped over it and crashed to the floor.

I saw this through a haze of powder.

I tried to paw the stuff out of my eyes. It was cloying and thick, but it didn’t seem like poison and it didn’t actually hurt. Then the guy who threw it stepped in and planted a mother of a punch into my solar plexus. The sucker punch slammed all of the air out of my lungs and dropped me to my knees. I honked and wheezed and gasped like a salmon on a river bank. The pain was enormous but the lack of air was ten times worse. I could not breathe.

“Shoot him!” barked one of the men, and I felt the cold barrel of the gun jab me in the back of the neck.

“Say the word, Victor…” growled the woman. She had a low, nasty voice. She wanted to pull that trigger.

“No!” cried the other man-who I assumed was Victor-and there was the sharp sound of flesh on flesh as he slapped the woman’s hand away. “We have to be sure.”

They weren’t speaking Persian. They spoke broken English and it sounded like each of them had a different native accent, but I was in no condition to analyze it.

Ghost whined and barked, but he couldn’t come to my rescue. Between the net and the Taser, he was done. I was on my hands and knees, blinking and gagging, my whole body heaving with silent convulsions.

The first man bent close to me. “You can see it, Victor! Look how he reacts. The powder is already doing its work.”

As I fought to control my traumatized diaphragm I struggled to process what they were saying.

The stuff they threw in my face definitely wasn’t poison or some kind of knockout drug. From the smell I think it was garlic. Regular, fine-grain, powdered garlic. Not exactly the kind of thing the bad guys usually throw. What was their follow-up? Tomato sauce and a bay leaf?

I managed to suck in a tiny bit of air with a sound like a deflating bagpipe.

“Let me kill him, Victor,” begged the woman. “For God, for the cause…”

“No! And point that damn gun somewhere else before you shoot one of us.”

Fingers knotted in my hair and then my head was jerked backward. The motion, violent as it was, helped open my airway and I gasped in a huge gulp of air like a swimmer coming up after staying underwater a minute too long.

The man named Victor-obviously the leader-touched the tip of something sharp and heavy under my chin and shifted around so that he could study my face. All I could see was a bleary version of his face. Heavy Slavic features and a thick moustache.

“I… don’t know… who you are…” I wheezed, “but you got the… wrong guy.”

“Shut up,” he snapped. I could see beads of sweat popping out on his brow and running down his cheeks. It wasn’t hot in the room-he was scared. Of me? Or of who he thought I was? He said to his companions, “Nadja, cover him. Be careful with that gun, but if he moves… blow his head off.”

The woman, Nadja, shifted around and pointed the pistol at me in a two-hand grip.

“Inigo, be ready with the hammer.”

Hammer? Christ, that scared me more than the gun. A gun would at least be quick.

Victor squatted down and leaned so close to me I could smell his breath. It reeked of garlic and tobacco. I wanted to make a joke, something about being mugged by a cooking class, but somehow I didn’t think I had the audience for it. I held my tongue and tried to regulate my breathing.

“He doesn’t look like one of them. His eyes are blue.”

“Then he’s wearing contact lenses,” Nadja fired back. “Peel them off, you’ll see.”

The second man, Inigo, still held my hair, so I was unable to move away as Victor placed his rough fingertips on my face. Thumb below my left eye, two fingers on my eyebrow, and then he slowly spread them apart, widening my eye. His other hand held the weapon against the soft underside of my chin. I did not know what they intended to do-blind me, stab me, shoot me, or pummel me with a hammer, but they were poised and tense and ready. And I was still recovering from the body blow. I was in deep shit and I could feel sweat greasing my own face.

Victor leaned even closer, and now I could feel the heat of his breath on my cheek and my eye.

“No,” he said slowly, dragging the word out in apparent surprise. “No, he is not wearing contacts.”

“Oh, you’re a blind fool, Victor,” snarled the woman. “Let me do it-”

“Hush!” Victor growled and the woman faltered.

Inigo kicked me in the hip. “Cut an eye out and take a closer look. He’s one of them.”

“Hush!” ordered Victor. He repeated the eye-widening procedure with my right eye, frowning as he did so. “See? He is not a knight.”

Ah, I thought, and I realized what he was looking for. My guardian angel sniper called the killer at the hotel a knight, and that goon with the fangs had worn weird contact lenses. As soon as I thought that I realized that it was wrong. The knight would have been wearing the horror-show contact lenses over his real eyes. Victor and the others were checking my eyes to see if my normal eyes were color contacts over…

My mind stalled at that.

Over what? Did they think that the knights really had blazing red eyes with slitted pupils? Or… was that really true of the knights?

If so…

I will rip your throat out and drink your life.

Holy shit. What the hell was I into here?

Church had warned me that I got off lucky when I fought the knight.

“Please,” I said, my voice strained because they had my head pulled back so far, “I’m not who you think I am.”

Victor’s frown turned into an ugly scowl. “Oh yes? And what do we think you are?”

“I have no idea… but whatever it is, you’re wrong. Why don’t we talk about this?”

“Victor, don’t listen to him,” warned Nadja. “He will try to control your mind.”

I expected Victor to rebuke her for the silliness of that comment, but instead I saw doubt and fear insinuate their way onto his features. He pulled his hand back and forked the sign of the evil eye at me and fired off a fragment of prayer, “O Lord, protect with Your right hand those who trust in Your name. Deliver them from the evil one, and grant them everlasting joy.”

Then he used his thumb to peel back my upper lip so he could examine my teeth. The others bent to look as well. Inigo grunted.

“No,” stated Victor, “he’s human enough.”

Human?

“Absolutely,” I agreed, though with his fingers in my mouth it came out as “Ahzoluly.”

Then Victor turned his head and looked at Ghost, who lay helpless and panting in the net. “And see-he comes with a fetch dog.”

Inigo’s grip on my hair eased a bit. “I don’t understand this. They said that he was a knight.”

“I know,” said Victor, licking his thick lips. “But when have you ever seen a knight in the presence of a fetch dog? I mean… how could that even happen?”

The others said nothing.

Victor straightened. “Krystos will be here any minute. He’ll know what’s happening. He’ll get to the truth.”

I really didn’t like the way Victor said that. I doubt I was supposed to like it; and it seemed to me that the bad situation I was in was about to get a whole hell of a lot worse.

Whoever this Krystos was, I didn’t want to meet him on my knees.

I had Inigo to my right side holding my hair-though not as tightly as before. Nadja was behind him, aiming past his shoulder at my temple. Victor squatted in front of me, one hand still on my lip and the other holding some kind of spike under my chin. And Krystos and who knew how many others were on their way.

None of the odds were in my favor, and Lady Sniper was nowhere to be seen. I was outnumbered and outgunned; I had no weapons. Why should today be any different?

It was die-or go for it.

I went for it.

Chapter Fifty-Five

I wasn’t nice about it, either.

With a bellow of pure rage, I kicked back with all my strength and caught Inigo in the crotch. He flew backward, arms whipping wide, and his left forearm smashed Nadja across the nose and mouth. She screamed and her finger jerked the trigger, firing a bullet that punched a hole in the wall a foot from Victor’s head. Nadja and Inigo fell together in a screeching tangle of arms and legs. The moment Inigo’s hand released my hair, I darted my mouth forward and bit down hard on Victor’s fingers. Bones crunched and he howled in agony. As he jerked his hand away, the spike cut me laterally across the underside of the chin, but then it clattered from his hand.

All of this took place inside one hot second.

I launched myself off the floor at Victor, but my foot slid in the coating of garlic powder they’d thrown at me. My reaching hands missed him by an inch as he backpedaled toward the entrance to the living room.

“ Monstrul! ” he bellowed as he scrabbled inside his coat. I thought he was going for a gun, but he produced a second spike and a second item, a rubber-headed mallet. And a detached part of my brain realized that it wasn’t an ordinary spike. It was a piece of polished hardwood that had been lathed down to a deadly point. He raised both items as he dropped into a crouch to meet my charge.

The son of a bitch was going to fight me with a hammer and wooden stake.

This would have been a great time for a flag on the play so we could all sit down and take a moment to find the thread of sanity we’d obviously lost. I mean, seriously-a fucking stake?

“ Monstrul! ” he cried again. “ Monstrul! ”

It was a Romanian word. It means pretty much what you think it means.

He chopped at my chest with the stake while raising the hammer high for a big downward strike.

I slap-parried the hand holding the stake and smashed his nose with a straight jab; the blow knocked his head back, chin high, to expose his throat. I sidestepped and smashed him hard across the Adam’s apple with the edge of my wrist. I could feel the cartilage collapse into rubble. Victor’s shouts imploded into a whistling wheeze as he tried to find breath that would never be his again.

As he sagged to his knees I tore the stake out of his hand. Now I had a weapon.

Inigo and Nadja were still disentangling themselves from each other in the cramped hallway. But suddenly I heard voices yelling from outside.

The kitchen door banged open and I heard the yelling of the names of my dancing partners.

The cavalry had arrived. Theirs, not mine.

Two men crowded into the doorway. One man-a big bruiser with a handlebar mustache-had another hammer and stake in his hairy fists; the other was an Irish-looking guy with no jacket and a shoulder holster over a black T-shirt. He was reaching for his nine millimeter.

I was out of time.

Screw this. If I was going to go down, then I was going down hard.

I still had the stake, so I kicked Mustache Pete in the nuts and drove the stake into Irish Bob’s chest. It punched through his pectorals but jammed to a stop on the ribs, so I hammered it deep with the flat of my palm. I wasn’t aiming for the heart-partly because that’s protected by the sternum and partly because I wasn’t as batshit crazy as these sons of bitches-but the spike sank to half its length in his left lung.

I let go of the stake and elbow-smashed him across the mouth which sent him sprawling into Mustache Pete, who seemed to be shaking off my kick too damn fast.

Incredibly the Irish guy wasn’t dead. He snaked out a desperate hand and grabbed my sleeve as he fell and that jerked me forward off balance so that we slammed into Mustache Pete and the three of us fell together in a twisted, spinning comedy of flailing limbs.

My body was under the pile, with Irish Bob on top of me. The impact crushed us together and drove the stake all the way into him. He died on impact, his body going immediately slack with a terminal exhalation. Unfortunately, his sudden dead weight pinned me to the floor with Mustache Pete half on top of us both. The combined weight of both men drove half the air out of my lungs. Irish Bob’s holstered pistol was pinned between us, with my right hand twisted into the press at a painful angle. To make it worse, Mustache Pete was trying to stab me with the stake. He had no clear angle, but he kept chopping at me, mostly hitting his dead friend. His face was a mask of confusion, insanity, and horror, and as he chopped he continually whimpered a word I didn’t know.

“Upier… Upier…”

I heard Inigo’s voice as he and Nadja tried to make sense of the melee on the floor.

“Mihai,” shouted Nadja. “Move… move! Let me get a shot.”

Mihai must have been Mustache Pete-and he ignored Nadja and kept stabbing at me with manic energy. It was a terrifying thing, and I had only one free hand to fend him off, but at the same time his body blocked Nadja’s aim.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Inigo moving in at an angle. He bent and grabbed one of Irish Bob’s ankles and started pulling him off of me. My legs were the only part of me that was free, so I kicked Inigo in the kneecap. It wasn’t the best angle, but, on the other hand, at most angles the knee is a pretty good target-strong as hell when it’s bent and locked, fragile as a breadstick when it’s straight. I caught him flat on the kneecap and his leg snapped with a gunshot crack.

His scream was ear-splitting-and then he collapsed right onto my other leg, and lay there twisting and screaming.

Shit.

Mihai rolled off of me and decided on a new plan. He crouched and sprang at me, holding the stake in both hands and plunging it downward with all his strength. There was nowhere I could go, no way I could avoid that deadly attack.

But Nadja chose that exact second to try to shoot me in the face. The timing was absolutely perfect. For me. Totally sucked for Mihai. I think he realized it, but by then he was already in the air and there was nothing he could do about it. Nadja’s first bullet blew his jaw off, splashing my face and throat with hot blood.

Nadja screamed in panic, and, as many people inexperienced with guns often do, she kept pulling the trigger. Bullet after bullet chopped into Mihai and dug holes in the floor right next to my head. The impact warped the arc of Mihai’s lunge, and he twisted as he went down, his shoulders and ruined face hitting the floor a foot from my cheek, his body flopping over so that he landed in a heap and did not move.

Nadja was still screaming when the slide locked back on the small automatic.

“Reload! Reload!” yelled Inigo between shrieks of pain.

I heard a car screech to a stop in back. More people.

Inigo shouted toward the sounds. “Krystos!”

Goddamn it.

Nadja fished in her clothes for a new magazine, dropped it, picked it up with trembling fingers. All the time she babbled to herself. “Oh merciful God… oh sweet savior…”

Inigo was crawling toward me, or so I thought. Then I saw that Mihai’s hammer and stake were right there. I squirmed and fought to get the dead weight off of me. Something hard jabbed me in the ribs and I realized that Irish Bob’s pistol was there, caught between us.

As Nadja slapped the magazine into the pistol I gave a great heave and tore the nine millimeter from the clamshell holster. It was a hammerless Glock 17.

Beautiful.

I couldn’t clear the body, though, so I buried the barrel against Irish Bob’s love handle and fired. The bullet met no appreciable resistance as it punched a hole through the dead man and caught Nadja in the stomach. It stopped her as surely as if she’d hit a wall, but there were footsteps in the kitchen. I fired twice more, hitting her in the sternum and then in the chin as she sagged to her knees.

Inigo actually stopped trying to stab me and stared with uncomprehending horror at Nadja.

With a growl I kicked my way out from under the bodies and put two rounds into him. Then I rolled onto my stomach as three figures rushed down the hall toward me. Two of them had guns in their hands, but they were pointing chest high, expecting a stand-up fight. From my prone position I emptied the rest of the magazine into them. The Glock carried seventeen rounds. I’d used three on Nadja and two on Inigo. That gave me twelve bullets to cut these cocksuckers down.

They all went down.

One of them-the guy in front-died right there.

The other two took multiple hits. Arms and legs. I was dazed and hurt and my aim was screwed up, so they lived through it.

That was not going to be a lucky break for them.

Chapter Fifty-Six

I scrambled to my feet and rushed the men in the hall. They were in a groaning heap and covered with blood. One of them tried to bring up his pistol, but I threw my own empty weapon at him, catching him in the face. While he was screaming, I broke his wrist and took the pistol from him. That jacked his screams up another notch. I wasn’t in the mood for it, so I kicked him in the face until he stopped screaming, and then I dragged him by the hair into the living room.

The second survivor wasn’t screaming, but he was conscious. Barely. He tried to crawl away, but his attempt was feeble. Once I disarmed him, I grabbed his ankle and pulled him out and dropped him next to his friend.

I had no cuffs and no rope. On the living room table was a big leather valise of the kind doctors used to carry. I fished in it and found various tools, more hammers and stakes, and a roll of duct tape. Nice. A thousand and one household uses.

I used a lot of it on the wrists and ankles of my two prisoners.

One of them-the guy who hadn’t screamed-had a pretty bad wound high on his thigh. He tried to use his taped hands to staunch the blood flow, so I tore the headscarf off of the dead woman and made a compress of it, then bound it tightly with the tape. Not a great job, but good enough for now. He watched my eyes as I worked, and from his expression of despair I knew that he knew that this wasn’t an act of kindness.

Patting the men down produced wallets with local driver’s licenses. Even though I was never a cop in Iran I could tell that the IDs were phony. Even so, the name on the conscious guy’s license was Krystos Gallikos. The other survivor was Constantin Enescu. A Greek and a Romanian. Add in the Russian broad, the Spanish Inigo, Irish Bob, and whatever the hell Victor and Mihai were and we had a real League of Nations here.

“You speak English?” I asked Krystos.

He stared at me without apparent comprehension.

I simplified things. I put the barrel of his pistol against his forehead, then bent and whispered in his ear. “Don’t fucking move.”

He grasped the subtleties of my request and gave me an enthusiastic nod.

Constantin lay in a fetal ball, apparently unconscious.

Out in the hallway Ghost barked weakly. I shoved the gun into my waistband and hurried out to him. He was a mess, totally entangled in the flexible wire net. It took me a couple of minutes to extricate him, and his panicked flailing did not help. I soothed him and spoke quietly, but Ghost had been pushed past his limits. When he was free he crawled toward me and buried his head on my thighs. He let loose a stream of urine that pooled around him.

I bent and kissed his head and told him that he was a good, brave boy. He gave my face a few nervous licks and his body trembled as badly as if he were in an icebox.

In the enclosed hallway the mingled smells of urine, blood, and garlic made a strange, cloying miasma that was completely unpleasant. It felt like horror and defeat. I tried to coax Ghost to follow me, but he wouldn’t; so I left him where he was for now.

Back in the living room I squatted in front of Krystos. His face was running with greasy sweat.

“I’ll ask this again,” I said, and I was mildly alarmed at how reasonable and calm my voice sounded. Given all that had just happened, this was not necessarily a good thing. “Do you understand English?”

He gave a stubborn shake of his head that allowed me to decide if he was saying no or telling me to go piss off. Behind me I heard a groan and whirled around. It was frigging Inigo, still alive with two bullets in his chest cavity. Tough son of a bitch. He was crawling like a slug toward a pistol that lay on the floor a yard away. I went over and kicked the pistol under the couch.

Inigo turned his head and glared up at me with total hatred. I stepped over and straddled his body, staring down at him from my full height. I looked from him to Krystos and back again.

“Who tipped you off about this place?” I asked him.

“Fuck you!” Inigo growled and tried to spit at me.

“Wrong answer,” I said and shot him in the head.

I made sure I was looking into Krystos’s eyes when I did it. Sometimes you need to use visual aids to really make your point.

Krystos screamed and tried to crawl backward into the wallpaper. There is a difference between seeing death in combat and seeing an execution of someone you know. I lowered the pistol and walked back to Krystos and hunkered down in front of him.

“Okay,” I said into an ugly silence. “Let’s try this again. Do you understand English?”

Krystos whimpered and forked the sign of the evil eye at me with his bloody hands. I rang the barrel of the pistol off the top of his head. Not too hard, but hard enough.

“Last try,” I suggested. “English?”

All at once the fight drained out of him. Maybe he finally grasped the fact that he was totally helpless and I owned his life. He kept staring at what was left of Inigo’s head. Without looking at me, he spoke in a tiny voice. “Y-yes. Some. A little.”

“Good, now we’re getting somewhere,” I said with an approving smile. “Are there any more of you fucktards around here? Anyone else in the house?”

His eyes roved around to take stock of all the dead. He shook his head.

I placed the hot barrel against the knee of his undamaged leg. “Be real sure.”

He whimpered as he cut a quick look toward the stairs and back. “No. My people… are all down here.”

I didn’t like the way he leaned on “my people” and knew that I was going to have to go upstairs. I sure as hell did not want to.

“Who sent you?”

“W-what?”

I said it slower. “Who. Sent. You?”

Now Krystos looked at me, and the expression that washed over his face was one of complete puzzlement. He said, “God.”

His tone of voice suggested that he was surprised I didn’t already know that.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“God,” he said again, shaking his head.

“You’re saying that God sent you to kill me?”

He nodded.

“Do you even know who I am?”

He shook his head. “It does not matter. You are one of them. Upier!”

“Which is what, exactly?”

He shook his head in exasperation, apparently perplexed that I did not know what he was talking about.

“We’ll come back to that,” I said. “Why does ‘God’ want me dead?”

Krystos licked his lips and winced at the taste of his own blood. “To… stop.”

“Stop what? Or who?”

“Evil. Big evil.”

I was getting tired of this and it must have shown on my face because he immediately recoiled from me. “No! Please, no!”

“You’re jerking me around, friend, and I’m not digging it. You can’t be this stupid, so tell me what I want to know or we can up the ante on this game. Who are you people?”

“We are Sabbatarians. We are Sat… Sat…” and again he fished for the English version of a word but this time he came up with it. “The… Saturday People. Our… cell… was alerted. About you,” he said, picking each word with care. “They said… you were working with… the Ordo Ruber. Against God. To… kill us all.”

I sat back on my heels. “What in the wide blue fuck are you talking about? What are ‘Saturday People’?”

Krystos touched his chest then nodded to the dead scattered around the room. “Saturday. All Saturday.” He was trying to tell me something but he was clearly playing the wrong song for the wrong audience. His face twisted in fear and frustration. “They said… I mean… we believed… that there were no more… like you… no more Upierczi left. We thought you were all gone. Years ago. A hundred years. More.”

“What do you mean ‘like me’?”

He looked away, not wanting to say the word. I used the barrel of the pistol to make him face me again. I repeated my question. He thought about it and finally came up with a word that I did understand.

“ Vampir!” he whispered.

Oh boy.

It was all so absurd that I almost smiled. Or, maybe I did. I felt my mouth do something ugly and twisted.

“Let me see if I have this straight. You jackasses think I’m a vampire?”

He cringed away from me, but he also nodded.

“Does that mean you think the Red Knights are vampires?”

Another nod.

I will rip your throat out and drink your life.

“Well, that’s just fucking peachy, isn’t it?” I said with a sigh.

There was a sound and we both turned to see Ghost, weak and trembling, standing in the doorway to the entrance hall. He started to come into the room, but I stopped him with a click of my tongue. Ghost sat down and studied Krystos with savage dog eyes.

A strange expression came over Krystos’s face. He looked at me, confused. “Are you… Stregoni benefici?”

I tried to sort out the translation. “Beneficial witch?”

He gave his head a violent shake. “ Vampir,” he insisted. “Church vampir. Vampir for God.”

“Do I look like a fucking vampire, Einstein?” I snapped. Then I sat back on my heels and blew out my cheeks. “And… I can’t believe I just asked that question.”

Krystos continued to stare at me, but now there was a splinter of doubt in his eyes.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s the game plan. You are going to sit here and not move while I go check the rest of the house. My dog is going to watch you. You do anything to my dog, you even look at him crooked, and you’re going to find that I’m a lot scarier than a vampire. Are we communicating here?”

Krystos cringed back and tried to melt into the wall. “No…!” he gasped. “No hurt. Never hurt white dog… fetch dog… fetch! ”

I was getting more confused by the minute. “You want to play fetch with my dog? Really, you want to make a joke now? ’Cause I have to tell you, pal, it’s not a great time to jerk my chain.”

“No,” he insisted, “ fetch dog. Fetch!”

He searched my face for understanding and obviously found none because I had none to give. He turned his face toward the wall and began muttering prayers.

“You’re less than useless,” I told him as I got to my feet. “Stay there and shut up. Don’t even think about trying to escape. You wouldn’t get far and I’ll kill you for trying.”

He shook his head. Tears ran down his cheeks and dripped onto his shirt. A small part of me wanted to feel sorry for him, hurt and scared as he was, but the rest of me told that part to shut the fuck up.

The house was quiet. I checked the rest of the bodies. They were all dead.

I collected the weapons from the fearless vampire hunters. A couple of guns, some knives, and the hammers and stakes. I looked at those for a moment, still amazed that they were any part of my version of the real world. The stakes were eighteen inches long and lacquered to a high gloss. They hadn’t been whittled, either; each one had been turned on a lathe by someone who understood woodworking. There was a long prayer carved into each one. The writing was tiny and I had to squint to read it, turning the stake in a circle to read the Latin that rolled around and around. Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperet illi Deus; supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae Caelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen.

My Latin is only passable, but I could make out some of it: “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in the battle…” As far as I could make out it was a prayer against evil. It seemed to fit the agenda for Krystos and his crew, but it explained nothing.

“Joe, old son,” I said aloud to myself, “you need to go the hell back to Baltimore. You need to take in an Orioles game, get drunk. Maybe get laid. Either way, you need to get your ass out of this freak show of a country.”

How do you process something like this? I mean… these guys were actual vampire hunters. Or, to rephrase that, these total whack jobs were taking their shared delusion to an impressive level.

I found a second leather valise in the dining room. It was crammed with more stakes, pouches of garlic powder, jars of pure garlic oil, and bottles of water marked with a black cross. I opened the lid and sniffed. Far as I could tell it was only water. I looked at the cross again and then back to the babbling guy on the floor.

Holy water? I wondered. Well, why not? What the hell else would it be on a day like this? These jokers had the whole official vampire hunter kit.

Okay, I thought, lots of fruitcakes in the world. People’s beliefs are their own, yada yada.

But why did they think I was a vampire?

Because they think you’re a Red Knight, muttered my inner Cop. I thought about the knight. The eyes, the incredible speed and strength. The fangs.

I will rip your throat out and drink your life.

I’ll buy a lot of weird shit. I mean, my job kind of depends on a belief in weird, but I’ll only walk out onto that ledge as far as science will stretch. I’ll do mad scientists and radical gene therapy. Been there, done that.

But… vampires?

“No fucking way,” I said aloud. The echo of my words came back to sting me.

I didn’t even know where to go with that speculation. I’m hunting rogue nukes in Iran. These guys are European vampire hunters. There’s no couch for both of those things to sit side-by-side on.

“Shut up and check the house,” I told myself.

The kitchen was empty, and I saw only two cars parked outside. No guards with them, but then I hadn’t expected any. I’d check those later. There was no basement. When I came back into the living room I saw the guy with the leg wound slumped over and for a moment I thought he was dead, but I found a pulse in his throat. He’d simply passed out. Whether from blood loss, shock, or fear I couldn’t tell and didn’t much care.

At the foot of the stairs I stopped and cocked my head to listen. I was pretty sure that there was no one else here, but “pretty sure” is a damn poor excuse for certain knowledge. So I left Ghost in the hall, pulled the gun, and ran the stairs.

I found Taraneh and Arastoo Mouradipour in the bedroom.

Or, rather, I found what was left of them.

Interlude Five

“Come in,” said the priest without turning. “You must be cold.”

Sir Guy removed his cloak and drew near to the massive fire that blazed in the stone hearth. The priest’s private study was deep within the bowels of the Krak des Chevaliers, and it was always winter down here.

“Draw near to my fire, my son.”

Nicodemus always said it that way-“my fire”-and it always mildly unnerved Sir Guy, as if the priest ascribed some special meaning to those words that no one but he appreciated.

Nicodemus picked a poker and began jabbing at the burning logs, repositioning them. Each thrust of the metal rod sent up showers of glowing sparks and dropped the ghosts of ashes onto the stones. “Tell me, my friend, what news do you bring from the agreement?”

“I met with Ibrahim as you directed, Father,” said Sir Guy, holding his hands out to the blaze to thaw his fingers. “He is ill, but still strong enough to work. We are nearly finished coding the books. I have four monks working now on the Book of Shadows, but Ibrahim does not seem to trust anyone else with what he is calling the Saladin Codex.”

“He is very secretive,” said Nicodemus, though his tone suggested admiration for that quality.

“However I fear for him,” said Sir Guy. “His health fails and I believe that it is the work itself that assails him. It seems to be draining the life from him with every page.”

“And what sickness do you suppose he has contracted from doing God’s work?” asked the priest with asperity.

Sir Guy chose his words carefully. “Ibrahim and all of his Tariqa are very religious.”

Nicodemus paused to cut him a quick look, then continued to poke at the fire. “Can that not be said of all of us, my son? Did not the two of you conceive this as an expression of your faith and concern for the future of our respective churches?”

“Yes, Father, but when I have doubts and fears about the spiritual cost of this, I have you to turn to. You are the church to me. Ibrahim has no such guide or refuge.”

“Islam has Istighfar,” countered Nicodemus. “It is one of the five pillars of that faith. The Tariqa confess their sins directly to God-not through man. Have you not heard your friend say ‘ astaghfirullah ’? ‘I seek forgiveness from Allah?’”

“I understand that, Father, but when the Saracens pray for forgiveness they often cite specific sins that were made and the passages of their bible which speak of forgiveness of those sins. His struggle comes from the fact that we have essentially written new pages into the Koran and the Bible.”

“Ah,” said Nicodemus. “I see. Tell me then, what sins can he not find forgiveness for?”

“Murder of others of his own faith-”

“‘Sacrifices,’” corrected the old man. “Murder is an act of hate. We do not hate those we kill. We love them, and in loving them we sacrifice them for the preservation of the church and the glory of God.”

Sir Guy took a breath. “Of course, Father. Ibrahim is troubled by having to sacrifice those of great faith. Clerics. Their imams. His heart likewise rebels at the desecration of mosques.”

“And yet, my son, this is the heart of our Agreement. We will each tend to our own flock and sacrifice our own lambs at the altars of God.”

“Yes,” said Sir Guy with passion, “and have you not seen how this also hurts our own people? I mean no insult by this, Father, but you do not go into the field with us. You do not see the wounds we open in the flesh of true believers. You do not hear their voices as they cry out to God for protection against monsters; and you do not hear the weeping of our knights in the night, in the dark. Many of our stoutest knights weep like children for the countless lives they’ve taken. Ibrahim is not the only one who fears for his sanity and his soul.”

Nicodemus gave the fire a final jab and then turned, still holding the poker whose tip now glowed dark red. The blaze in his eyes was hotter still. “Is that what you’ve come here to tell me? Has everyone on both sides lost their nerve, then? I thought our knights were true soldiers of God. Are we to fold our tents so quickly, leaving so much sacred work unfinished?”

“No, Father. I proposed a solution to him that I believe will work to strengthen everyone’s resolve.”

Nicodemus narrowed his eyes. “What solution?”

“What we are doing now is all about, as you so rightly put it, sacrifice, and we have agreed that many sacrifices need to be made in order to inspire the people and remind them of their spiritual duty. We call it the Agreement, and we label each death as a sacrifice because we do not make war on each other. But what if it were otherwise? What I proposed to Ibrahim is a second Agreement that would permit a brand new kind of war. One that has never been fought upon the earth. One which would allow each side to feel the strength of holy purpose in their arm every time they draw a sword.” He stepped closer to the fire and the old priest. “Father, I am saying that we turn our swords against the enemies of God.”

“You are talking a holy war,” growled Nicodemus, “and again I say that we already have that.”

“We have an open war that is doing no one any lasting good. The Crusades have become a business venture to see who possesses the most land and the best trade routes, and for every enemy killed in the name of God there are a hundred slaughtered in the name of profit. I propose a limited war. A quiet war. A war fought in the shadows.”

“Wars escalate. What would prevent this ‘shadow war’ from escalating into random killing, or killing for profit as we have now?”

“We would impose limits and restrictions. This would have to be managed carefully and regularly. Representatives from each side would have to meet regularly to agree on how many deaths would be allowed, how many castles or churches or mosques destroyed, and so on. And we would have to agree on the value of each death. Just as we now select our sacrifices for their importance to the masses, we would share that information with the other side, thereby transforming the process from self-sacrifice to mutually created martyrs.”

Nicodemus pursed his lips and turned away, walking slowly and thoughtfully across the room to the shadowy wall and back again, passing Sir Guy and crossing to the opposite wall. Sir Guy stood in silence, watching the old priest as he paced. Five long minutes passed as Father Nicodemus thought it through, and his seamed face was etched with firelight and shadows. The priest stopped a few feet from the hearth and stared into it for another moment, and then nodded to himself.

“A war of shadows,” he murmured as fire danced like devils in his eyes. “Yes. But your knights, skilled killers that they are, are too clumsy for the kind of killing you propose. This war would require stealth. Spies, who could steal into the strongholds of an enemy and kill them in their beds. That would strike fear into the hearts of the faithless and that would drive them back to God.”

Sir Guy nodded. “Ibrahim said that he could make a deal with the fida’i, those Sufi killers who cause so much trouble for the Templars. The cult of assassins run by Hassan ibn Sabbah. Ibn Sabbah is a great friend of Ibrahim’s. Would that we had their like in Europe. We will have to invent what we need. We will have to find a way to train candidates to become a new breed of warrior. Not knights but assassins like Ibn Sabbah’s fida’i. ”

Nicodemus suddenly straightened and walked a few steps away. He stood staring into the shadows a long time and his body was so rigid with tension that Sir Guy dared not interrupt.

Finally, Nicodemus turned, but his face was in shadow.

“Do not be afraid, my son,” murmured the priest. “God Himself speaks through me and He has whispered a word to me. The answer to what we need to wage our shadow war.”

As Nicodemus stepped forward into the firelight Sir Guy gasped and took an involuntary step backward, for once again a strange and inexplicable change had come over the priest. His brown eyes swirled with colors-leprous yellows and greens, mushroom white, and the mottled brown of toad skin. Sir Guy touched the heavy silver cross that hung around his neck.

“What word?” asked Sir Guy with a dry throat.

The priest smiled, revealing crooked yellow teeth.

“Upierczi,” he whispered.