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
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 10:02 a.m.
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
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 10:04 a.m.
“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?”