“What if we meet the fearless vampire hunters or those Red Knight goons?” asked Lydia.
“They’re not Iranian nationals,” I said. “No grace for them. So that means one person on each team has a nonlethal gun for diplomacy and the other has live rounds for deal-closing. Chatterbox, Sergeant Rock, and Warbride are the best shooters, so you get to play with the grown-up toys.”
“Hooah,” they acknowledged.
I unslung the bag I carried and opened it. We had used most of the garlic powder and oil according to Jonatha Corbiel-Newton’s instructions, but there was some left. Everyone held their hands up and I filled their palms with powder.
Bunny’s face was screwed up in distaste as he choked his down. “Never eating Italian food again,” he complained. He washed it down with a mouthful of water. We’d been following this ritual for hours now, and I felt like my stomach was churning from all I’d swallowed. I passed around my pack of gum and everyone took a stick.
I used the last of the powder on Ghost, working it into his fur. He absolutely hated it, and it probably reduced his sense of smell by two-thirds, but I was the pack leader and he endured it. Pretty sure he was going to crap in my shoes first chance he got.
Before we broke the huddle I added a final note. “This is a shit job and we all know it. We’re rolling on squeaky wheels here as far as intel goes and we know for a fact that we have more enemies than friends. Watch your asses, trust no one, and do not get taken.”
“Yeah,” said Warbride, “and don’t take candy from strangers.”
Everyone grinned, and it seemed for a moment as if they were all at peace with this. Maybe, I thought, it was the kind of warrior’s calm that sometimes happens when soldiers know that they’re walking into the valley of the shadow of death and that there’s no real way out.
Chapter One Hundred Two
Private Villa Near Jamshidiyeh Park
Tehran, Iran
June 16, 5:00 a.m.
The last call was the kicker, and he was looking forward to this. It rang eight times before Grigor answered.
“There’s been kind of a wrinkle,” said Vox breathlessly. “This is urgent and you have to act right now. You need to get the triggers in place, and I mean right now.”
“We don’t have the-”
“I know, I know. Look, Grigor, you’ve played fair with me and I’ve been jerking you around. That was wrong, and I’m saying it to you right now. I was wrong and I apologize. I’m also sorry as hell about your son. I… lost my son recently, too. So I’m going to stop screwing around with you. I’ll text you the password to activate the code scrambler.”
Grigor said nothing, but Vox was sure he could hear the Upier’s mind churning.
“Something’s happened that made me realize that I’ve been screwing with the wrong guy here.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s LaRoque… he knows. ”
“Knows what?”
“Everything. He knows about the bombs. He knows that the Upierczi are about to rise up. He knows everything.”
“Impossible!”
“No it’s not impossible. He’s kept you in chains for eight hundred years-do you think he hasn’t had you monitored? Especially since the rebirth? You’re more of a threat to him than ever, and he knows it. Just as he knows that the Order isn’t as strong as it used to be. The Agreement’s in pieces, and you know as well as I do that Rasouli is never going to restart the Shadow War. That fucker wants a true jihad. Guess who will be caught in the middle? Guess who LaRoque will use as cannon fodder to force a new Shadow War? Do you honestly think LaRoque or Nicodemus cares a wet fart about you?”
“So what?” sneered Grigor. “Let them come for us. Let them hunt us in the tunnels.”
“Jesus, man, do you ever listen to yourself? Stop auditioning for the remake of Dracula and pay attention. LaRoque isn’t going to come after you himself. He’s too afraid of you. No, he’s leaked information to the authorities. To the DMS, to that agent Ledger, the one who killed your son at the hotel. LaRoque will go into hiding while Special Forces teams come after you, and believe me they will hunt you through the tunnels, and there are a lot more of them than there are of you.”
Grigor was silent, and Vox smiled to himself. Nice. Now it was time to play his final card. The one real kicker. The one that would take all the chips on the table.
“Grigor… there’s one more thing.”
“What?” demanded the King of Thorns.
“The American Spec Ops teams have allies in this. Allies who can help them find you and hunt you.”
“Who? Those Sabbatarian fools? We laugh as we kill them-”
Vox said, “Arklight.”
The sound Grigor made was somewhere between a snarl of animal hatred and a hunting scream. Vox leaned away from the phone, wincing. He thought he heard the name Lilith in there somewhere. Vox was sure he had never heard so much hatred directed at a single person before.
It made his groin throb.
“Give me that password,” seethed Grigor. “I will show them a war like nothing they have ever seen. I will drown them in lakes of blood…”
Vox stopped listening to the tirade. He tapped in the password that would activate the code scrambler he had given Grigor. The scrambler, with its powerful satellite uplink that could send detonation codes to those lovely nuclear devices.
As soon as the password went through, Vox called up the file of all DMS personnel and their families and sent that too. What the hell. The Sabbatarians didn’t seem to be getting the job done. Let Edward the Sparkly Vampire and his undead hordes tackle it. That sounded like a whole lot of fun. Maybe Grigor would be the one to finally tear Deacon’s throat out. How sweet would that be?
Vox disconnected the call halfway through Grigor describing how he would crack his enemies’ bones and suck out the marrow. Or something like that. Vox didn’t care.
All of his cares were over.
Chapter One Hundred Three
Arklight Camp
June 16, 5:02 a.m.
Church had a complete tactical operations board in his Humvee. It was a new design, one that used flexible circuits for a display board that could be erected in curved panels to form a large semicircular arena. High-res images and holographic overlays created a three-dimensional model of the two theaters of operation. Louisiana and the Middle East, and this latter was subdivided into four separate locations: the Aghajari oil refinery in Iran, the Beiji oil refinery in Iraq, the Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, and the Toot oilfield in Pakistan.
Small glowing dots indicated the transponder signals from the teams that were moving into position.
A central screen showed Aunt Sallie and the TOC at the Hangar. Church was an observer here, watching Auntie run the show.
“All teams on station,” said Aunt Sallie, who was seated to his right at a gleaming command console. “WMD alarms and hot loop equipment stowed. OPs pulled in. All personnel report alert. Infil teams one through six report ready to move immediately. We are at REDCON-One. Waiting for the word.”
Church sensed movement and saw Lilith standing by the opening to the little arena, and he waved her inside. She studied the display and nodded approval.
“You always did like your toys,” she said with a faint smile.
“High technology used correctly allows for the greatest efficiency,” he murmured as he tapped keys to bring up another smaller set of display windows. This showed the screens that Rudy, Bug, and Circe were looking at. He and Lilith leaned forward to study them.
“Is that the translation?” asked Lilith.
“Yes.” He touched a button to open a line. “Circe, what do you have?”
“MindReader has decrypted four percent of the Book so far and about twice as much of the Voynich manuscript. Each one is different, and each is very disturbing in its own way.”
“How so?”
“The first few pages of the Book of Shadows is the Holy Agreement, and it’s what
we expected. The Red Order and the Tariqa agree to work together to do ‘what is necessary’-that’s the phrasing they were apparently most comfortable with-in order to ‘lead the people to faith and to fealty to God in all things,’ yada yada. Essentially, it’s an argument in favor of hate crimes. Or maybe we should call them ‘faith crimes.’ Something like that. The rest of it though… my God! It’s a kind of history without commentary. It lists every single thing both sides have done to carry out the Agreement. If the whole book is like this, it will be the most complete confession of guilt ever recorded. Hundreds of thousands of deaths. More if you count wars that were started or extended because of the Holy Agreement. We even found a section that shows that the Order influenced Pope Clement V to disband and excommunicate the Knights Templar because the Red Order needed their fortune and resources to continue their private war. That will rewrite a lot of history books. Actually-this all will.”
Church didn’t comment. “Keep at it,” was all he said. He muted the audio feed.
He turned to Lilith. “This is what you wanted,” he said. “You can take this to the world court, to NATO, to any group of governments and they will start a new version of the Inquisition to hunt down anyone responsible, anyone still connected to the Order or the Tariqa.”
Lilith stood with her hand to her throat, considering it. “It doesn’t take down the Upierczi. Unless we can produce a body, no one will believe that they even exist.”
“They are slaves of the Order,” said Church. “Perhaps one of them will give the Upierczi up as part of a deal.”
But she shook her head. “This is where you and I differ,” she said. “You think Nicodemus is the power behind all of this. Nicodemus and now Vox. I don’t.”
“You think it’s Grigor.”
“I know it is. I can feel it in my bones, in my heart.” She closed her eyes. “I lived in one of his cells for fourteen years. He took thirteen children from me. Ripped them from my womb, one after the other. I can’t even count the number of times he raped me.” Her eyes were as hard as fists. “I know what his dreams were. It may have been the LaRoques who brought in the scientists and paid to have Upier 531 developed-but it was Grigor who demanded it. Yes, he demanded it. He made the Order repair the bloodline of his kind. It fulfilled a dream he had. He talked about that dream incessantly. In the night, in the long dark when no one from the Order was down there in the tunnels. Grigor talked to himself, to his people, about the dreams of the Shadow Kingdom. I would lay there at night, naked, filthy, starving, chained to the wall with an iron collar around my ankle, listening to the echoes of his words whispering through the darkness. You call them slaves, but they see themselves as warriors. A race of warriors. The Red Order kept them in shackles through faith, and then when God would not save the Upierczi, science did. Do you think that lesson was lost on Grigor?”
“What’s your point?”
“Look at it from Grigor’s perspective. At first the Upierczi were a scattered race of genetic freaks, or at best a dying and failed offshoot of Homo sapiens. The Red Order found them and gave them purpose, but for centuries kept them in chains. They are called knights, but they are slaves and they know it. Over the centuries, despite the promises of the Order and their own prayers, the bloodline of the Upierczi has failed, become polluted. They’ve faded to the brink of extinction. God did not come even when the Red Order called on Him. Then science saved them. By taking the DNA of the greatest among them, Grigor, their race was reborn. Not in the image of God. Not by the grace of God. They were remade in the image of Grigor. When faith fails and science answers, where do you turn?”
Church said nothing.
“When you have lived as slaves for centuries and accepted your slavery because it was God’s will, what happens when you stop believing that?”
Church said nothing.
“There is a war coming, Deacon, no doubt about it. But it’s not about oil and it’s not about politics. I’ve known you a long time and yet I don’t know you at all. So I wonder how willing you are to fight this kind of war.”
He stood up and walked to the entrance and looked out at the night for a long time. Far in the distance a night bird cried out in a voice that was as sad and desolate as all the pain in the world.
His cell phone rang. Mr. Church answered it and listened for a moment.
“I understand,” he said. “Thank you, Mr. President.”
He set his phone down and touched a button on the console. “Auntie, the word is given and it is ‘go.’”
Aunt Sallie nodded and sent the command signal. “All dogs off the leash.”
On the screen, the glowing dots began to move.
Church looked at Lilith. “A theory, however compelling, is not a target. If Arklight has any intel that you haven’t shared, then now is the time. Give me a target, Lilith, and I’ll show you what kind of war I am willing to wage against those monsters.”
There was a soft ping and Church touched the button to unmute the computer center.
“Mr. Church,” said Rudy, “we have something you need to see.”
“Is it about the Red Order?”
“It’s about the nukes,” said Circe. “There aren’t seven of them.”
“Then how-”
“There are eight.”
Chapter One Hundred Four
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 5:29 a.m.
We moved down a set of metal stairs that zigzagged along a steep wall, with Ghost’s nails clicking behind me. I was dressed like a security guard, and Lydia was in her chador and carrying a clipboard with important looking papers on it. She made sure not to make eye contact with any of the men, and she walked a half pace behind me. The men who passed us did not avoid looking at her. I don’t know how they were able to determine how good looking she was under the billowing black clothes-and Lydia was a hottie by any rational definition, a little bit of JLo but with a Michelle Rodriguez badass bad-girl sneer-but every single man who passed us gave her a thorough up and down.
At one point, when we were alone, she murmured, “I can’t tell… are they undressing me with their eyes or wondering how I would look with another layer of clothes on?”
“Beats me, sister.”
“I can’t tell you how much I’d like to flash my boobs at them just to see them have total coronaries.”
“I think they stone you for that here.”
“Might be worth it.”
I grinned and we kept going.
Although it’s usually cold beneath the desert floor, it was hot as hell down here. Steam hissed up from vents like the whole place was going to blow-or that’s how it looked to my frenzied imagination. When we passed refinery staff, they were going about their business as if it were just another day on the job, which to them it was. Actually, I guess for me it was too. Jesus, I need to get into a safer line of work. Lion taming, maybe; I heard the benefits package is good.
The farther down we went the more humid the air became, and the heavier the smell of raw oil and cooked petroleum. Two levels down I saw that the walls were lined with stretches of dark lichen and cobwebs.
“Are we at the center of the earth yet?” asked Lydia.
“Australia’s a couple of floors down.”
When we were at the base of the last stairwell, Lydia slid back her sleeve and tapped the keys of the PDA strapped to her wrist. We studied the map and compared it to our surroundings. The floors were marked with old painted lines color-coded for different destinations for routine maintenance. We followed one that rounded a snaking series of turns, passing dozens of small rooms with locked doors.
Lydia was a better lockpick than I was and she fished out a couple of pieces of flexible plastic and loided the locked rooms. Janitorial office, supply closets, bathrooms. Nothing of interest, so we kept moving.
Ghost, with his heightened senses, was drinking it all in, cataloging a thousand smells and their variations. He was trained to react to ni
trites from explosives, to decomposing flesh, and to a few other key smells, but so far he wasn’t giving me any of the signals that said he’d found anything. You can’t train dogs to detect nuclear materials.
When we were in a stretch of empty corridor Lydia checked the PDA again, then looked at the walls and up at the low ceiling. “We’re getting seriously deep here, Gaucho. We still have a signal?”
I tapped my earbud. “Talk to me, Dancing Duck.”
Khalid said, “Checked all my unknowns off the list on levels eight and seven. Nothing. Laundry rooms and showers. Heading down a level.”
His signal was almost buried under a hiss of static.
“Roger that,” I said. “Sergeant Rock?”
“Nothing yet but we need to finish level two. Five more unknowns to put eyes on. Lots of foot traffic here. Slowing us down.” His signal was even worse; he sounded like he was whispering at the bottom of a well.
“Copy. Your signal is weak and variable.”
“Back atcha. What’s your twenty, Cowboy?”
“We’re rock bottom. No joy. Moving to zero point.”
Zero point was the last spot where Abdul’s spies had been able to penetrate and add to the map. Based on the original design plans of the refinery, there should be four hundred yards of corridor and several utility rooms there.
We rounded another bend and encountered two problems at the same time.
The corridor ended forty feet beyond the turn. Not in a closed door but in a flat brick wall. There were doors along the side of the corridor, however, and one stood ajar as four security officers stepped out into the hall.
They glanced at me and Lydia and Ghost.
The guards were all low-ranking patrol officers, the kind who were too far down on the pecking order to know if I was part of the staff or not. Unfortunately the other guy wore the bars of a major in the Iranian security forces. The top ranking officer in the whole refinery was a major with big eyes and buck teeth. He ignored Lydia-who was pretending to look at the floor-and pointed at me.
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