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.
Iñigo 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 Iñigo’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 Iñigo 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 Iñigo 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 Iñigo between shrieks of pain.
I heard a car screech to a stop in back. More people.
Iñigo 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…”
Iñigo 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.
Iñigo 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 Iñigo. 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
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 12:41 p.m.
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 Iñigo, 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 Iñigo, 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.
Iñigo 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!” Iñigo 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 Iñigo’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.”