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
Barrier Safe House
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 10:46 a.m.
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 Ita
lian, 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
The Hangar
Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn
June 15, 2:25 a.m. EST
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
The Warehouse
Baltimore, Maryland
June 15, 2:26 a.m. EST
“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,” C
irce 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.”
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