Assassin's code jl-4

by Jonathan Maberry

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

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

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

  “You have no idea.”

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

  I paid for the goat.

  “May your day improve,” said the shopkeeper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But, no… there was nothing.

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

  “What is it, boy?”

  Ghost, being a dog, just looked at me.

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Thirteen

  Southwestern Iran

  Twenty Kilometers from the Kuwait Border

  Ten Hours Before…

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

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

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

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

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

  Not good.

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

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

  “I’m in,” said Khalid.

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

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

  “Converge on me. I’m Santa Claus.”

  He tapped out of the channel.

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

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

  “‘LZ’?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Fourteen

  Homa Hotel

  51 Khodami Street, Vanak Square

  Tehran, Iran

  June 15, 8:29 a.m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She hung up before the Serbian could ask another question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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