My neck didn’t hurt as much, but I couldn’t move it. I couldn’t move anything. When I was able to separate the painful things that were my ankles and wrists from the bigger painful thing that was my body, I realized that they were held fast.
I was tied down. I could feel bindings across my chest, my waist, my thighs.
Panic surged in my chest.
Who had me? The Iranians?
The Red Knights?
My mind hit a wall going eighty miles an hour.
The Red Knights. What about them? Why was I afraid of them?
Sure, there was the goon back at the hotel, but he was dead. Had I met another Red Knight? If so… where? Everything was so-detached. I fumbled for pieces of my mind but they were slippery and they rolled away.
Where had I been? If I could remember that maybe I could figure out where I was now.
I told myself not to move. My inner voices echoed this.
Don’t let them see that you’re awake, cautioned the Warrior.
Remember your training, whispered the Cop. Observe first, gather intel. Process it, evaluate it. Assess the situation and determine your tactical position.
Position? Up shit creek without a paddle.
Then I felt a presence near me. It wasn’t exactly a sound; more of a sensation of awareness, as if someone was watching me and noticed that I was awake.
A voice said, “Cap’n?”
I had to concentrate to identify the voice. “Top…?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said and squeezed my shoulder very gently.
My eyesight came back slowly, slowly. It was dim and blurry, but I could see Top sitting beside me in the back of the truck.
“Where’s the team? Is everyone okay?”
“We got out,” was all he said. A few moments later he added, “Got a stealth helo coming for us. Be here any minute.”
I licked my lips, and Top put a straw to my lips and let me drink.
“Top…?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I move?”
There was a pause.
“Come on, First Sergeant… tell me.”
Top said, “You’re all messed up. You took a lot of-”
“Christ! Is my back broken? Is that why I can’t move?”
“No,” he soothed. “No. It’s your head. Lydia thinks you might have a skull fracture. Definitely a concussion, and a mother of one.”
“What does Khalid say, goddamn it? He’s the frigging doctor.”
Top’s face was filled with pain. “Khalid’s gone, Cap’n. You know that. You were there.”
But I didn’t remember.
“Gone? Christ, what happened at the refinery?”
“We got the scrambler. You did, you and Khalid. But…”
“But what? Stop screwing around and tell me.”
“Those knights. They killed some of the staff and took their places. They were rigging the whole place. C-4 charges on wellheads, charges all over. Looks like once the nuke was active they wanted to bury it under a couple million tons of flaming debris. Wouldn’t stop the nuke down there in the subbasement, but if we were an hour later we’d never have gotten to it. Not unless we knew the tunnel system, and we didn’t.”
“We stopped it, though, right?”
“The nuke? Yeah. Nobody’s going to set it off. Not now.”
I didn’t like the way he said that. “What’s wrong? What are you not telling me?”
Top sighed. He nodded to someone, and I slowly turned to see Bunny sitting at the back corner of the truck. There were tear tracks on his cheeks.
“Good to see you awake, Boss,” he said, but there was no life in his voice.
Top said, “Open the door.”
Bunny cut a worried look at me and back to Top. “Sure you want to do that?”
“Open it, Farmboy.”
With a heavy sigh, Bunny pushed the door open so that I could see the bright noonday sun.
Except that it was early morning and the sun was still behind the mountains.
The big smiling face of the sun was not that at all. It was the leering demon face of a mushroom cloud. Many miles distant but massive, and it seemed frozen against the darkness, like a brand burned onto the flesh of night. Not a nuclear blast, which is a mercy, I suppose. This was the entire Aghajari oil refinery curling upward in a fireball five hundred feet high.
I said the word that I didn’t want to say, asking it as a question.
“Violin?”
Top sighed.
“She and the Arklight team tried to stop the knights from setting off the charges. She… never made it out, Cap’n.”
I could feel all of the horror and outrage and fear of the last couple of days sear that image onto my soul. I knew that I would never forget it. I would never be able to forget it.
We had won, but we had also lost.
Epilogue
(1)
I was out of it for a long time.
Church was there when I opened my eyes. He looked haggard and old.
“Christ,” I said. “If you look that bad, I must be a frigging mess.”
He didn’t smile.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
I had to think about it, and I fell asleep a couple of times.
When I opened my eyes again it was morning and there was sunlight slanting in through the windows. Rudy was gone. Instead it was Mr. Church in the chair beside my bed.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“The trauma center at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.”
“In?”
“New York.”
I thought about that. My body was swathed in bandages and, although there was pain, it was buried under a heavy layer of something. Morphine. My head felt like it was stuffed with bubble wrap.
“What do you remember?” he asked,
“Rudy asked the same question.”
“When?”
I couldn’t answer that, and I realized that this wasn’t the same room. “I don’t know.”
“Do you remember the raid on the refinery?”
It took me a long time, and the memories were sluggish and reluctant. “Some of it. Maybe. Did we… did we win?”
Church nodded. “You had the code scrambler. All eight of the devices have been secured.”
“Eight? I… don’t remember eight.”
But then I did. And that memory brought other memories. Church watched my face as each came tumbling downhill at me. Grigor. The army of Upierczi. Everything else.
“My team,” I asked. “John Smith?”
“No,” he said.
“Khalid.”
“No.”
We sat in the silence of that for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Church said eventually. “They were good men.”
“They were family.”
“Yes,” he said. “They were.”
“What about the others?”
“Everyone else took some hits, but they will all recover.”
In body, I thought, but in spirit? In heart? I had my doubts. There was only so much loss a person could take.
“Ghost?”
“He’s recovering. He needed some work. He had cracked ribs and lost a couple of teeth. I arranged for dental implants. Titanium.”
“How-?”
“I have a friend in the industry,” he said with a faint smile.
There was one more name, but I was afraid to ask; and I vaguely remembered a moment like this with Top. Or was that a dream? Church read it on my face. He shook his head.
“No,” he said.
(2)
Church told me all of it.
The Book of Shadows was deciphered. Circe believed that it was the way the knights confessed their “sins” to God for everything they did to fulfill the Holy Agreement. Each entry was countersigned with the letter N. Nicodemus? Probably. Bill Toomey, the head of our handwriting analysis team, said that the same person counters
igned every page, but of course that can’t be right.
Can it?
Toomey was doing carbon dating of the ink on all the signatures. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read his results.
Charles LaRoque was taken out by a Hellfire missile. Very appropriate. When the Iranians picked through the rubble they found three bodies. A driver, the remains of the last Scriptor of the Red Order, and the body of a man whose identity remains a mystery.
Grigor and the Upierczi from Aghajari? Like the song says, it’s all dust in the wind.
There are probably more of them out there. There are always monsters in the dark.
But Arklight is out there too. Hunting them, with the full resources of the DMS at its disposal.
If I were one of those bloodsucking freaks, I’d kill myself before I let Lilith’s people find me. I wonder if monsters have their own version of the boogeyman. I wonder if the thing that they dread when they go to sleep at night looks like a beautiful woman with eyes that hold not the slightest trace of mercy.
Rasouli tried to flee the country, too. Mr. Church made a phone call and even though Armanihandjob was in no way our friend, he was useful as a weapon. Rasouli will probably be in prison until the Middle East becomes a sunny center of tolerance and friendship for all.
Church, the presidents of America and Iran, and a few other key people met in Switzerland to discuss the Holy Agreement. The ayatollahs hoped to edit out Islamic involvement and lay it all on the Christian Church, but that was never going to happen.
“What will happen?” I asked Rudy, when he came back to visit me.
He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing visible. Nothing that will ever make the news.”
“Why the hell not?” I demanded, but Rudy looked at me with disappointment.
“What good could possibly be served by telling the world about this? Do you think it would stop hate crimes? Do you really think that it would end the violence in the Middle East?”
I sighed and turned away from him.
“Of course it wouldn’t,” he said sadly. “It would throw gasoline on it.”
“What happened to ‘the truth will set you free’?” I growled.
He sighed. “As much as I hate to say it, Cowboy, sometimes a lie is better.”
“Ignorance is bliss? Is that our stance?”
Rudy didn’t answer, because there was no answer.
And the world? It didn’t end. It still leans heavily on a crooked axis, and it still turns.
But as the weeks passed I saw something I hadn’t expected.
Throughout the region the guns have fallen silent. Tensions are down across the Middle East. No one exactly knows why. At least, no one in the press seems to know.
Without gasoline on the fire, maybe the fire is finally going to burn itself out.
That would be nice.
We’ll see.
(3)
Violin?
They never found her body, of course.
Burned, they said, along with so many others. Human and vampire. Charred to dust, blown away by the hot winds of an unforgiving desert.
I saw Lilith, very briefly, at the joint-use base. She wouldn’t even look at me.
Everybody needs somebody to blame.
Maybe she’s right to pin it on me. Violin wasn’t just looking for the scrambler. She came looking for me. She told me that much, and it’s all we ever got to have.
(4)
The name on the young man’s passport was Gerald Hopkins. He did not look at all like the person he had once been; no one he had ever known would be able to pick him out of a lineup. People who had known him last year couldn’t even do that. The face and fingerprints of Gerald Hopkins matched the computer records. No bells or alarms rang. The airport security officers in Germany did no more than an ordinary search of the man and his possessions before passing him through.
“Have a safe flight, Mr. Hopkins,” said a cheerful man at the gate.
“Thank you,” said Hopkins, but he was not smiling. He found his seat and buckled in and sat staring out the window for the entire flight. He did not fly first class.
When his plane landed in Canada there was no one to greet him. He hired a cab and, except for the name of his hotel, Hopkins said nothing at all on the drive. The hotel was a modest one, second or third tier. He checked in, locked his door, set his bags down and spent the next full day sleeping.
When he woke up, he stumbled into the bathroom and stood naked for half an hour under the hottest spray he could endure. His skin screamed and he screamed. But the spray was loud and the walls were sturdy and nobody reported it to the front desk.
Later, he ordered room service, and while he waited he looked out at the skyline of Montreal. His mind was a furnace.
When the porter knocked, he opened the door and stood looking at the floor while the young man set up a table and laid out the meal. Hopkins gave him some cash and locked the door again when he was gone.
The food was cold before Hopkins finally sat down to eat. He removed the metal cover to see how the steak had been cooked.
There was no steak. The plate was clean. But it was not empty.
Instead there was a folded piece of paper.
Hopkins rushed to the door and checked through the peephole, but the hall was empty. He parted the curtains, but he was on the ninth floor and there was no one down on the street that looked like police or military. No SWAT.
Cautiously he crept toward the table and the note.
He was sweating, heart hammering as he picked it up.
The sheet was a single piece of legal-size computer paper folded into a small square. Hopkins carefully unfolded it. Most of the sheet was given over to a printed list of charity organizations around the world, the majority of which were devoted to poverty, clean water, and other humanitarian causes in third-world countries. None of them were high profile. Nothing that would get headlines.
Below that was a printed list of forty-seven numbered accounts and the balances of each. He knew those account numbers by heart. The amounts in each were untouched.
And below that, written in a neat hand was a short note.
The road to redemption is paved with rocks.
There are no third chances.
Do it right.
Hopkins read the note over and over again. There were only two men powerful enough to have gotten this information and arranged its delivery. He had abandoned one, and he was sure the other wanted him dead.
And yet.
The note was unsigned.
But it was not Hugo Vox’s handwriting.
The young man clutched the note to his chest. The first sob nearly broke the world. The tears burned like acid. He slid out of his seat onto the carpeted floor.
And, in the silence of his cheap hotel room, Toys wept all through the night.
(5)
Hugo Vox was grinning as he entered his study in Verona. Everything had played out perfectly. The Red Order was in ruins, and good riddance to the self-important pricks. The Tariqa were being hunted with quiet vengeance by their own people. Although they had been inactive since their leaders were killed during the invasion of Baghdad, many of them had old blood on their hands, and all of them were clearly willing to continue the centuries-old insanity. The surviving members of that sect would feel a wrath greater than anything Islam had leveled against the West.
Payback, Vox mused happily, was a real bitch.
He regretted that the knights were done, or as close to done as made no difference. They were interesting as all hell. They were one of the things that pulled him into this. Vox knew that he was a sucker for something with a biblical spin. Vampires. Bloodsucking hit men for the Church. You couldn’t make this shit up.
Shame the real story didn’t get into the press. That would have been legendary. That would be books and movies. Maybe they’d have gotten Ron White to play him. Vox loved that guy, never missed his stand-up act. Looking at him was like looking in a mirror. Well,
a younger mirror.
He turned on a single light, locked the door, and crossed to his computer. He had looked for Toys on the Net, using the resources that had once belonged to the Seven Kings, but he hadn’t found him. The kid was all the way off the grid.
Vox’s smile flickered when he thought of Toys and the last, hard words between them.
I hate you, Hugo. I wish you were already dead.
Had Toys really meant that?
Probably.
Fuck.
He switched on the computer, entered his passwords, and accessed his banking records. His wealth was so scattered and so well protected that it was almost impossible to calculate. Somewhere a hair’s breadth south of one hundred billion. Nothing to piss on.
Enough to rebuild the Seven Kings.
Or, maybe find the scattered remnants of the Upierczi.
Hell, maybe both.
If he was going to live forever, he might as well have some fun.
He was smiling as he tapped in his banking codes. The screen buzzed with an error message. Mistype, he figured, and tried again. And again.
“What the fuck?”
He switched to a different bank and tried to log in.
The same thing happened.
He tried seven more, his fingers trembling with panic. Nothing.
“Goddamn son of a bitch, what the f-?”
A voice behind him said, “You’re wasting your time, Hugo.”
Vox jumped and spun around in his seat. He had not seen the figure sitting quietly in the darkness of the far side of the study. Vox had not even sensed his presence. The figure was seated in a leather chair, legs crossed, body relaxed and casual, face completely hidden by shadows.
“God…” Vox gasped, and he felt as if a hand were suddenly clamped around his throat.
The figure reached to the lamp on the nearby table and switched it on. In the yellow glow of the low-wattage bulb he looked calm, his face without expression, the lenses of his tinted glasses reflecting Vox’s shocked and terrified face.
“Deacon… Holy Christ, how’d you… How’d you…?” He could not finish the sentence.
Mr. Church lifted something from his lap. A coded cell phone. A purple one. “I received this in the mail. From a mutual friend.” He tossed it onto the floor between them. “My friends in the industry constantly amaze me with what they can do with reverse engineering. Even to the point of turning a simple phone into a tracking device.”
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