Assassin's code jl-4

by Jonathan Maberry

  Lilith seemed unable to speak, but she finally croaked out a question. “And the cipher?”

  “We hit one last hitch. MindReader was able to translate the first page of the Book of Shadows, which is mostly introductions of Sir Guy LaRoque and Ibrahim al-Asiri and their various titles and political affiliations. Typical diplomatic stuff and not of any use to us because we know who they were.”

  “Damn,” growled Violin, and a wave of disappointment began sweeping through the Mothers and Echo Team.

  But Circe was not done. “The code is devious; it changes incrementally. MindReader’s pattern search figured this last part out. On the first page of the Book of Shadows, the mathematical error was exactly as described in the Codex. However, on the second page, the error is doubled, then tripled on the third page, and on and on until you get to page ten, then it resets to the first error. With that last piece, we can now calculate the rate of error and use those errors to create a key to crack the ciphertext.” She took a breath. “The Book of Shadows and the Voynich Manuscript are ours.”

  “Good God,” murmured Church. “This is brilliant work, Circe.”

  “Rudy and Bug did as much as I did,” she said.

  “I will thank you personally when I see you,” he said. “Bug, how soon before MindReader deciphers both books?”

  “Two hours. Because the books are handwritten, and by more than one person, it has to adjust to variations in the way the coded documents were phrased.”

  “Do what you can to speed that up. Call me when you find anything, and I do mean anything.”

  He disconnected the call and stood silent, his jaw tight, mind working. Lilith had the same inward-looking expression. Maybe we all did. No one said anything. This was massive news to Church and the Mothers, but I felt like I was on the fringes of it. Maybe it would help Arklight-with or without the help of the DMS-take down the Red Order and the Tariqa, but that seemed to be tomorrow’s battle. I didn’t see how the translation of old books was going to help us find nukes today.

  Then Church’s cell rang again. Everyone came to point like a pack of retrievers, but it wasn’t Circe. Church listened for a moment and then said, “Very well.”

  He closed the phone and looked at me.

  “That was the president,” he said. “The word is given. The mission is a go.”

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  Arklight Camp

  Outskirts of Tehran

  June 16, 3:23 a.m.

  Church stepped out of the warehouse to make a series of phone calls to get this rolling; the first of which was to Aunt Sallie. She was in the big Tactical Operations Center at the Hangar, which made NORAD look like an Internet cafe.

  Bug called us just as Church rejoined me.

  “I ran down every priest who chose the name of Nicodemus,” said Bug, “and either MindReader is having a senior moment or there is something mucho freaky about the Vatican database.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, there is a pretty tightly managed registry of priests. Names, personal data, photographs, the works. This goes back pretty far, to the point where paper records were stored and later scanned; and back past that to written records. All scanned now into their systems. Worldwide there have been a couple of hundred priests who chose that name, and a few for whom that was their birth name. Now here’s the kicker. About once every generation, call it twenty-five to thirty years, there is a record of another priest taking that name. Always from the same place, Verona in northern Italy. The thing is, we have dates of births and dates of deaths of each priest, but when I cross-referenced this with public records in Italy, they don’t match. In fact, there are no records at all of any of those priests. Either these guys lied when they applied to priest school or whatever it’s called, or there’s a conspiracy to hide the true identities of these guys.”

  “Swell,” I said. “Another mystery. ’Cause I was just thinking that I wasn’t nearly confused enough.”

  “Then buckle up, Joe,” said Bug, “because there’s one more thing that popped up. I added Verona to the general pattern search for this case and guess whose grandfather was born there?”

  “Just tell me, Bug.”

  “The family name is Verrecchia. But that’s not the name he uses now.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Vox.”

  “Wait-Hugo Vox’s family comes from the same town as Nicodemus?”

  “More than the same town, Joe. Half of the men who adopted Nicodemus as their priest names were born as Verrecchias. Nicodemus and Vox are from the same family.”

  Chapter Ninety-Five

  Private Villa Near Jamshidiyeh Park

  Tehran, Iran

  June 16, 3:24 a.m.

  Vox looked at his watch and smiled. Time to make the first of his calls.

  He took several fast, panting breaths while he punched a speed dial. Charles LaRoque answered on the second ring.

  “ Jesus, kid, you got to stop them,” said Vox, putting panic and urgency into his voice in exactly the right amounts.

  “Stop who?”

  “The Tariqa, who the fuck do you think I’m talking about. That whole thing with Rasouli and the flash drive? That was a smokescreen. It was bullshit to get the authorities looking in the wrong direction. And all the time he’s working out a deal with your pet monsters to shove the Agreement right up your ass.”

  “What are you talking about?” LaRoque’s voice was filled with genuine panic.

  “I’m talking about doomsday, you stupid fuck. I warned you- begged you-not to tell Rasouli too much before he took the full oath. He’s not the Murshid and never had any intention of being that. You know what he wants? He wants to put a lot of Christian heads on poles. He doesn’t want to keep the Shadow War going. That’s small potatoes for him. He’s ramping up Iran to be a nuclear power. And he’s got a really goddamn good chance of uniting all of Islam against the West. You Red Order clowns think you’ve been keeping the church alive? Rasouli is going to blow Christianity off the planet with a mushroom cloud and remake the world in the name of Allah.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Hugo,” said LaRoque with a forced laugh. “Even if Rasouli betrays us, he doesn’t have that kind of power. Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons yet.”

  “Iran doesn’t,” Vox said, “but Rasouli does. He arranged to buy decommissioned devices from the black market. The same bombs you tried to buy before 9/11. He has them. ”

  “Impossible. We never told him about-”

  “He has an inside track to the whole Red Order. You have no secrets left, Charlie. Rasouli has you by the balls.”

  “No, you’re wrong. No one in the Order would dare-”

  “Don’t you listen? I never said that a Hospitaller betrayed you. What I’m saying is that those bloodsucking dogs you think you have on the leash have been off the leash for a long damn time.”

  “What?” LaRoque asked, but now there was doubt in his voice.

  “Yeah,” said Vox. “Rasouli has made a deal with your devils.”

  Chapter Ninety-Six

  Arklight Camp

  Outskirts of Tehran

  June 16, 3:27 a.m.

  “Vox and Nicodemus are related,” I said. “That’s it, I’m going home.”

  I expected Church to looked rattled by the news, but he stood there, slowly nodding to himself.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Pieces are coming together.”

  “Making what kind of a picture?”

  “I’m not entirely sure yet, but let me ask you this, Captain, do you feel that we’re at war with the Red Order?”

  I thought about it. “Actually, even though this thing is tied to them, I… I really don’t see how. We’re at war with someone.”

  “Are we?”

  “The nukes.”

  “The nukes are in play, but we haven’t yet cracked the logic of their placement. There have been no threats, no demands. Nothing in the case files on the Red Order suggests an anti-A
merican agenda.”

  I thought about it. “Y’know, I kind of have the same feeling about Rasouli. I mean, he kicked this off by giving me the flash drive, but the drive itself is sketchy, and he’s been totally off the radar since it began. Granted, that’s not even a full day yet, but Rasouli feels like a day player. A walk on.”

  Church shook his head. “He’s more important than that, otherwise the flash drive would have been sent anonymously through the mail. No, Rasouli and the Red Order are in this. I’m simply not convinced we’re at war with them.”

  “They sent a Red Knight after me.”

  “Someone sent a knight after the drive. Not the same thing.”

  I grunted. “What about the Sabbatarians?”

  “They’re independents. They hunt the Upierczi, which means they don’t work for the Red Order; and they are fiercely Catholic, which means that they aren’t acting on behalf of Rasouli.”

  “The question, then, is who pointed them at me?”

  “Captain-take yourself out of the equation. They were pointed at the knights, who were in turn pointed at the flash drive. You… got in the way.”

  “Ah. I guess the villains just aren’t that into me.”

  He manfully refused to smile.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’m going to nominate Vox as the bad guy. Who else has ‘criminal mastermind’ on his business cards?”

  “Vox alone?”

  Interesting question. “Nicodemus?”

  Church shrugged. He left to make a few more calls.

  I saw Echo Team standing apart from the activity, looking like a biker gang that had crashed a women’s empowerment meeting. I gestured for them to follow me to the far end of the warehouse.

  “Good job tonight,” I told them. “I was listening and I still never heard you on my six.”

  “Kinda the point,” said Lydia. “Clumsy soldiers don’t get Christmas bonuses.”

  We stood for a moment, each of us looking back at the cluster of Arklight women as they continued arming for war. I saw Violin sliding loaded magazines into slots on a bandolier. She saw me watching and gave me a brief nod that I returned. We turned away at the same moment.

  “Top,” I said, “get back to the other warehouse and get everything ready. Finish modifying our equipment, but don’t use all the garlic. Church will have some kind of transport here soon. As soon I talk to the Big Man again I’ll come back for a mission briefing. Everyone eat some food, hit the head, take your vitamins. Finish that special project I gave you earlier from those notes Circe got from that folklore professor. Looks like we’re going to need it. We need to be ready to rock, and who knows how long this will take. Bring as much extra ammunition as you can carry.”

  “Boss,” said Bunny, “what that woman said? That’s all true, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shook his head. Bunny was no naive kid, but this was all a long, long way from Southern California.

  Khalid looked concerned. “There’s a question we need to ask these women here,” he said. “If garlic hurts the vampires, is it safe to use around the… um… what was the word?”

  “Dhampyri.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good question. I’ll ask. In the meantime, let’s hustle.”

  “Hooah,” they said, and I watched them vanish through the back door, silent as ghosts.

  Chapter Ninety-Seven

  Arklight Camp

  Outskirts of Tehran

  June 16, 3:43 a.m.

  As I turned to go find Violin, I saw Church heading quickly toward me.

  “We’re hitting them all, Captain. A coordinated soft infiltration. Everyone is moving in at the same time. Four targets here in the Middle East and the one in Louisiana. I have every DMS and JSOC team not currently assigned to one of the targets on deck. Nuclear response teams are on high alert. We’ll do whatever is possible to do, but we can’t wait any longer.”

  Soft infiltrations meant stealth and nonlethal weapons. Doing just one required extensive planning and training. Doing five? I whistled. “You ever do anything like this before?”

  “No one has. So, we get to write the playbook on it. Your team has to avoid a political incident as well as find the bomb.”

  “You want us to do this on tippy-toes?”

  “Correct. You’ll infil during this evening’s shift change. Once you’re in position, you’ll begin an unobtrusive search for the device. Floor plans and construction blueprints for the refinery were on the flash drive, and Aunt Sallie has mapped out several likely areas for such a device to be hidden. Given its nature, and based upon the image from Rasouli’s phone, we are looking at a basement or subbasement. The construction blueprints of the refinery and the current surveillance layout are close matches, but they’re not exact. There are some postconstruction additions and some things that apparently were never built. Or at least that’s the CIA’s determination. Your map will have anomalies indicated by red dots. Don’t trust the Company’s report. When in doubt get eyes on those anomalies. Abdul will rendezvous with you here and deliver you to the site. He has a workable plan prepared.”

  “Already? How’s that possible?”

  “It’s a repurposed plan. Abdul was working with the Company to set up an operation at one of the nuclear power plants. He delivers heavy mechanical parts to refineries and the nuclear plant-turbines, generators, transformers, air purification systems, and so on. There’s a lot of overlap with the refineries and the nuclear station, and Abdul is well known. The refineries operate twenty-four hours a day, though at night the staff is reduced by about half. Nighttime deliveries are common. Heavy equipment is often delivered at night to be ready for installation by the larger morning shift, so this won’t raise any eyebrows. Abdul has been ordered to scrap the other plan in favor of this.”

  “What’s our confidence in the infil plan? Can Abdul get us in?”

  “Almost certainly, though this operation might compromise him, which means that his usefulness in Iran will likely end. He won’t be happy about it, and the CIA is definitely not happy about it, but I don’t particularly care about their feelings, Captain, and neither should you.”

  “I don’t. Mission comes first, and our mission has a shorter shelf life than theirs, so it sucks to be them. End of story.” I paused. “What about the last two nukes?”

  Church shook his head. “We’re nowhere with them.”

  I stared at him. “Damn.”

  “Yes.

  “When do we roll?”

  “Abdul should be here in twenty minutes. Figure two hours to the refinery, with a half an hour on either end for loading and unloading.”

  I looked at my watch. “We’ll be hitting the place just shy of dawn. That doesn’t leave us much time to prepare a mission plan.”

  “Figure it out on the fly.”

  “Rasouli could be lying about the number of sites,” I pointed out. “There might only be five nukes. Or none.”

  “Or there could be twenty,” said Church. “I’m aware of the risks; however, the overall threat increases the longer we let this play out. The president wants the sweep to focus on the known targets, regardless of additional intel.”

  “Yikes. There are a whole lot of ways this could go wrong.”

  “Yes, and very few ways to get everything right. And once this is all over there will be very angry people in several foreign governments, even among our allies. We’re putting armed soldiers into play without seeking permission from any government. A lot of sovereignty rules are going to be bent or broken, and that’s too bad. The State Department is working up several variations of a presidential response, no matter how this spins out. Best-case scenario is that we’ll later claim to the world press that we were always working in concert with, and at the invitation of, these governments. If we find and de-arm the bombs, then those governments will have to stand by us publicly and agree that they invited us in as advisors.”

  “Armanihandjob, too?”

  Church
didn’t respond. I was two for two with nobody laughing at that joke.

  “We have to face the possibility that our enemies will detonate the remaining two devices as soon as they know about the hits.”

  “Well, you’re just a ray of sunshine,” I said. “I so look forward to our little chats.”

  “If you want something cheerier, I hear that Best Buy is hiring.” He cocked his head at me. “Until you determine that the device is, in fact, at the refinery, you will be operating under limited rules of engagement. Avoid conflict but don’t get taken. If fired upon, you are not authorized to use lethal force. We are not at war with Iran.”

  “So don’t start one,” I said, “yeah, I get that. You’re asking a lot from Tasers and beanbag rounds.”

  “This order comes from the president, not from me. However, make sure the nonlethal weapons aren’t all you are carrying.”

  “Something else,” I said. “Khalid brought up the question of whether these dhampyri are vulnerable to garlic? ”

  “It varies. I know that some of them have been killed by Sabbatarians who attacked them thinking they were Upierczi. In heavy doses garlic is fatal to them too. But it’s not a matter of simply being around garlic. The garlic oil has to be introduced into the bloodstream, or in powder form into the lungs. They will be wearing ballistic shielding and each of them carries injectable epinephrine. Every soldier knows there are risks.”