“How do I know that you really spoke to Vox?” I said in a quiet growl.
Rasouli offered a thin smile. “He said that you might ask that, so he gave me something to say. I suppose it is a code phrase that will mean something to you. It means nothing to me.”
“What is it?”
“Vox told me to say, ‘I vetted Grace and she was clean. She wasn’t one of mine.’”
I had to work really hard to keep what I was feeling off my face. It cost a lot.
Grace.
Damn.
When I’d first joined the DMS a year ago, Church’s senior field officer and my direct superior was Major Grace Courtland. She was as beautiful as she was smart and tough. She had been the first woman to enter Britain’s elite SAS team as a field operative, and she helped build Barrier—Britain’s elite and highly secret counterterrorism rapid response force—and was later seconded to Church when Congress gave him approval to build the DMS. Grace and I went into combat together, we worked together, and we fell in love together. We never should have done that, it was against common sense and every rule in the book. Then, last summer, a professional killer’s bullet took Grace away from me. She died saving the world. The whole damn world. I still hear her voice; still catch glimpses of her out of the corner of my eye. Still feel the absolute yawning, cavernous absence of her in my heart.
She had also been vetted by Vox before coming to work for Church. Some people on both sides of the pond tried to use that to smear Grace’s good name. Church had words with a few of them. I had words with a few others. Word got around and people shut the hell up.
Hearing her name on the lips of this monster filled me with a rage so intense that black poppies seemed to bloom before my eyes. Rasouli watched my face and I could see the delight he took in what he saw. He was like a vampire, feeding off of my pain.
The voices in my head all screamed at me to drag Rasouli to the floor and …
… I closed my eyes for a moment.
Grace.
Thinking of her tricked me into a memory of her speaking my name.
Joe.
The black flowers of hate withered and blew away, leaving a strange, cold control. I smiled at Rasouli and after a moment his smile faded.
“Vox,” I said quietly.
“He spoke quite highly of you. I think he likes you … and he certainly admires you. He called you ‘tenacious.’”
I leaned toward him. “Hear me on this. If you are working with Vox to bring any harm to the United States or its people, I will make it my life’s work to tear your world apart. I’m not talking about government sanctions, and I’m not even talking about a black ops hit. You’ll go to sleep one night and when you wake up it’ll be you and me someplace where you can scream all you want, because believe me you will want to scream.” He started to smile at the brash phrasing, but I leaned an inch closer. “If you’re here then you know who I am, and what I’ve done. You know that most of the wiring inside my head is already fucked. It wouldn’t take much to push me all the way over the line. Look at me. Look into my eyes, tell me if I’m lying.”
His mouth tightened into a hard line as he cut a glance at his bodyguard, who was cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick, and back to me.
He said, “You are correct, Captain Ledger. I do know who—and what—you are. And it is for that reason that I risked so much to meet you.”
“And Vox?”
Rasouli’s lip curled as if he suddenly smelled dog shit on his shoe. “He is an insect to be stepped on. If you are asking if he and I are conspiring together, then no. I would sooner let a desert camel have its way with me.”
“And yet you can call him up for favors any time you want?”
He thought about that, shrugged, took a pen and notebook from his pocket, wrote a string of numbers, tore off the page, and handed it to me. “All I have ever had for him is a phone number. It’s a cell number that we have never been able to trace.”
I looked at the number. “What are the chances that Vox will answer this call?”
“I do not know and do not care,” he said. “Vox is your concern. If you can use that number to find him, then do so with my blessings.”
“Is this the party line?”
Rasouli shook his head. “No. Vox has friends among the ayatollahs, but you probably know that.”
“Is he in Iran?”
“I have no idea.”
We sat for a moment with that floating in the air between us. Then I slipped the page into my shirt pocket. “God help you if you’re lying to me.”
Rasouli frowned, but it wasn’t a fear reaction. It looked as if he was considering another aspect of what I’d said. Perhaps it was the reference to “God.” Whatever it was, he nodded.
“There are times, Captain, that people who share as many ideological and political differences as do we can share a compatible view of something else. In prisons, for example, even the most hardened murderers cannot abide a molester of children.”
I said nothing.
“Before we continue, Captain Ledger, let’s be clear on something,” he said. “I know that it was you who freed the spies last night.”
“Don’t even try,” I warned. “Those three kids were hikers. They’re as close to being spies as I am to being a prima ballerina, and believe me I don’t look good in a tutu.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Are you really so naïve that you believe their cover story? I would think someone of your caliber would be in the loop.”
“I am. They’re not spies.”
“This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered this kind of thing,” he said. “You always send ‘kids’ to spy on us. You think the veneer of innocence is more convincing than it is. The Peace Corps was created with CIA money. Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization … they’re all fronts and everyone knows it. It’s not even an ‘open secret’ anymore.”
“Horseshit.” I said it loud enough to finally provoke the doofus bodyguard, Feyd, to take notice. I wanted to see how he reacted. He straightened and looked around like an old dog that had just woken from a deep sleep. Rasouli watched me watching and waved Feyd back with an irritable flick of his hand.
“Of course, you would deny it,” Rasouli snapped. “You deny it because you think I’m wearing a wire?”
“I don’t care if you brought a film crew.” I took a sip and set aside my cup. “What’s the play here? Did you really set this whole thing up, the snipers and all, just so you could debate politics with a tourist?”
“Ah,” he snorted with a sour smile. “‘Tourist.’”
“Ah,” I said with a nod in his direction. “‘Human being.’”
“The spies—”
“Hikers.”
“‘Hikers,’ whatever, are not the issue, Captain. We will get them back.”
“Not a chance.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. If I had to guess, I’d bet you a shiny ten-rial piece that they’re eating lunch at the U.S. embassy someplace safe. Kuwait, maybe.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“I’m doing touristy things. I even went to a few museums. Want to see my ticket stubs? Right now, I’m doing nothing more sinister than having a cup of coffee and reading the paper.”
“While waiting for a pickup car, perhaps?” His smile faded. “Captain, let’s not—what’s the American expression? ‘Jerk each other off’?”
I grinned.
“Frankly I don’t much care about the hikers, even though I know you were involved.”
“Yeah? How about the mosque bombing? You don’t want to try and hang that on me, just for shits and giggles.”
“I have no interest in arresting you for anything.”
“Better for everyone,” I said. “You wouldn’t survive the attempt.”
“You are very sure of yourself,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I am. I’m not saying that your guys couldn’t take me—we’
re in your country, not mine—but not with you still sucking air. Might even be worth it, though.”
If Rasouli was frightened by my threat he managed not to show it. “We are wasting time neither of us has.”
“Okay. So why are we here? What do you want to talk about?”
His eyes glittered like cold green glass. “Let us talk about saving the world.”
Chapter Seven
The Agriculture Building, 7th floor
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 7:59 a.m.
“We have to go,” said the tallest of the four women. She was a blocky Serbian with a knife scar across her mouth.
“You go,” said the Italian woman by the window. Although she was younger by twelve years than the Serbian and had less field time than either of the other two—a Castilian brunette and a French blonde—the Italian was the team leader. “I want to watch this.”
The others nodded and began packing their gear—disassembling their sniper rifles and scopes—but the Serbian lingered. It was her laser sight that had danced over the heart of the American agent; it was hers that had wandered down to burn with ugly promise over his crotch. She would have taken that shot, too. Without hesitation or remorse. Now her black eyes bored into the younger woman’s.
“Another team is already on Rasouli,” said the Serbian. “They’ll pick him up when he leaves the café. Why are we wasting time?”
The Italian woman turned slowly away from the window and fixed her gaze on the tall Serbian. She held that stare for five full seconds, not blinking, not allowing a trace of emotion to change her expression. It was an old trick, one of Lilith’s—something her mother had used on her countless times—and it worked now, too. The Serbian’s eyes held for four seconds and then slid away.
“I want to watch the American,” said the Italian, letting her gaze linger a moment longer before she turned without hurry back to the window. She made sure not to turn or acknowledge as the three other women finished packing.
After the other two filed out, the Serbian lingered in the doorway. “The American isn’t our—”
“I’ll decide who is and isn’t our concern,” snapped the Italian. When she was angry her tone was identical to her mother’s, and it shut the Serbian up as surely as a slap across the face. It did that with everyone. The Italian gave it a few seconds to set the mood, then she said, “Set up a surveillance post. Two cars. If Ledger leaves the café I want to know where he goes and where he’s staying. Upload surveillance photos and data to my personal file on Oracle.”
The Serbian nodded so curtly that it looked painful. “And then?”
“And then go back to the staging area until I call you.” The Italian made sure that her voice carried every bit of Lilith’s icy command. It was an illusion, borrowed power, but it was a useful skill that she’d begun cultivating before she was ten years old.
The other women mumbled something and went out.
When she could no longer hear their footsteps on the stairs she waited another thirty seconds, and then sighed, her shoulders slumping.
Was it ever like this for Lilith? Probably, she thought, and wondered how long her mother had to fake being tough before she actually became the stone-faced, stone-hearted monster she was now.
Knowing her mother as she did, that transformation had probably happened at a much younger age, maybe before she had been abducted by the Upierczi. If it hadn’t been there already, Lilith would never have escaped the pits, never have escaped the breeding pens.
For her own part, the Italian woman did not yet feel that hardness developing within her own soul. Perhaps it all came down to how many people she had to kill, perhaps there was a line that, once crossed, burned away all softness. At twenty-five, the Italian woman could still count the numbers. Every head shot, every cut throat, every garroting and poisoning. Lilith? If even half of the stories were true, then her kills could fill a medium-sized office building. Or an entire graveyard.
The woman believed that all of the stories told about her mother were true.
Every last one.
And everyone in the sisterhood expected her to be her mother’s daughter in every sense.
She murmured a brief prayer in Latin as she bent to peer through the sniper scope at the two figures seated in the coffee shop.
Joe Ledger and Jalil Rasouli.
Why had she lingered to watch?
The question flitted around in her head, fluttering like a bat after moths.
Why?
The obvious reason was to maintain surveillance on Rasouli, who—she hoped—did not know that the team he had hired had been actively surveilling him for three months. The Italian woman’s team was one of several who kept tabs on Rasouli and other key players in the Muslim world. Just as other teams kept a close watch on significant persons in the Christian world. Adding to the general store of information about Rasouli’s whereabouts was the obvious answer to the question.
Obvious, but a lie.
The truth was something that she could never put into a field report. She would not know how to phrase it anyway. A gut instinct. A feeling. In her personal lexicon she called it a “flash.”
They did not happen often and sometimes she never understood what they meant. However, there were too many times in her life when a flash—a moment in which her entire mind and heart were locked onto a single person—proved to be a turning point. Sometimes those flashes saved her life.
Sometimes they forged an instant and inexplicable connection between her and the person who she was destined to kill.
She stayed there, seated on a folding chair, her sniper rifle resting on a bipod which in turn rested on a stack of small, sturdy crates. Not watching Rasouli.
She watched the American. The man who had identified himself as Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger.
She liked the name.
And she liked the man, which surprised her.
Not for the obvious reasons, and even she was aware of that much. To be sure, Ledger was tall and fit, handsome in the rugged way athletes often are. Some rough edges, a few visible scars, a lean waist, and muscular shoulders. That wasn’t it, though.
It was his eyes.
Her sniper scope was of the finest quality. Very precise and powerful. Through it she had looked into the man’s eyes while he joked with her on the phone. She knew that he’d been afraid. Who wouldn’t be with laser sights on him? But he wasn’t afraid in the right way. His was a practical fear, of the kind that only warriors have.
Warrior. She tasted the word. It was grandiose and yet it seemed to fit him quite well. More than that, though, was the hurt she saw in his eyes. Not hurt from anything related to this incident. Deeper hurt, older. That was something this woman understood more intimately than anything else. Her world was built on pillars of pain and suffering.
Was it possible that this man’s soul dwelt in a similar tower? Was that why she felt the flash at the moment when she and her team had first trained their laser sights on him?
If so, then it would genuinely hurt her to have to kill him.
Chapter Eight
Starbox Coffee
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 8:03 a.m.
I stared at Rasouli. “Saving the world from—what?”
He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Consider this. If scientists discovered than an asteroid was hurtling toward the earth and was likely to strike in one year, would it not be possible that the best and the brightest from all countries would drop their hostilities and work together to prevent a shared disaster?”
The comment was so weird that it jerked my head into an entirely different place. At the same time my heart started doing another jazz riff. “Christ! Is that what this is about?”
“What? Oh, no … no,” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “I speak hypothetically about the nature of our response to a shared threat too large for any one country to handle alone.”
“Next time say so. You almost gave me a frigging heart
attack.”
He smiled at that. Jackass.
“Okay,” I said, “Given the right kind of potential catastrophe, then that kind of cooperation is possible. Even so, red tape would be a bitch.”
“And yet the red tape could be cut if the threat was more imminent, yes? Say that this hypothetical asteroid was due to strike in a month? The need for immediate and uninhibited action would necessitate a quicker exchange of information so that the situation could be handled. After all, global extermination trumps individual ideologies.”
“In a rational world, yes,” I agreed. “Where are you going with this?”
“There is a matter that will require very great and very careful cooperation.”
He removed a cell phone from his jacket pocket and played with the touch screen to bring up a photo, then handed the phone to me. “Do you know what that is?”
I stared at the picture and my mouth went as dry as dust.
“Good God…”
“Indeed,” agreed Rasouli.
I knew all about them, of course. I had to. I knew the history, studied them for my job, read the field reports. I had seen them in museums and textbooks and on the Discovery Channel. Knowledge may be power but at that moment I felt as weak as a child. Even as a picture on a phone—small and frozen in a snapshot moment of time—it was terrifying to behold.
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