Assassin's Code

by Jonathan Maberry

  Bug grinned so hard his face looked ready to explode. “Bingo!”

  “Okay, boy genius,” said Aunt Sallie, “tell us.”

  “I could do it,” said Bug. “In fact I’m really, really, really sure that someone else who is almost as smart as me did exactly that.”

  “Almost as smart?”

  Bug sniffed. “If I did it, no one would ever have figured it out.”

  “Arrogance is a serious personality flaw,” said Rudy, but he was smiling.

  “The whole package here is a little too cute,” said Bug. “Either Rasouli thinks we’re pretty dumb, which isn’t likely; or he thinks we’re really smart. I’m going with that, because layer after layer he’s giving us useful stuff, but stuff only we’d figure out. I mean, I’d buy the whole ‘this was damaged’ business if there were more bits of useless junk, but there’s hardly any of that. Almost everything we have is useful in some way.”

  “Which is statistically improbable,” added Circe.

  “Why the subterfuge?” mused Rudy. “If the drive was deliberately damaged, should we infer that Rasouli is double-crossing us in some way?”

  “Possibly,” said Bug. “At the same time, I don’t think he knows enough. By fragmenting the data he has, it tells us a lot while at the same time possibly disguising all that he doesn’t know.”

  “Why go to such lengths?” asked Rudy. “He reached out to us for our help.”

  “Politics,” suggested Aunt Sallie. “He’s an ambitious little bastard. Maybe he found a way of strengthening his position within Iran, or maybe within Islam, while still removing a possible threat to his country. The less specific he is with us, the easier it could be to spin the actual outcome in his favor.”

  “That’s cynical,” Rudy said.

  “Hell, we do it all the time. Spin control is the second most important tool of statecraft, and probably the third most important weapon of war after big guns and strong allies.”

  “It’s also devious,” added Rudy. “Very much the Hugo Vox model.”

  Circe sighed. “Yes.”

  “Do we trust the information?” asked Auntie. “Can we trust it?”

  “Do we have a choice?” muttered Circe.

  Chapter Thirty

  Golden Oasis Hotel

  Tehran, Iran

  June 15, 9:42 a.m.

  I kept expecting the woman to call back, but she didn’t.

  Violin.

  I went into the bathroom to pack my toiletries. Ghost came and sat in the doorway, watching me in case I happened to discover a beef bone in my shaving kit.

  As I puttered around, I tried to make some sense of the pieces of the mystery I had, but it was like trying to assemble one picture with pieces from four different puzzles. There was the hikers thing. That’s why I was here in Iran. There was no intention or even possibility of any interaction with the Iranian government. I don’t think I had ever spoken Rasouli’s name aloud before today; until now it was only a name in news stories and in a handful of CIA field reports that crossed my desk.

  Before Rasouli, there was not even a whisper of rogue nukes. I mean, sure, everyone knows about Iran’s nuclear project—which is not even a “leaked” secret. Iran was behind the first press stories. They wanted the fear of it to give them leverage. What the general public didn’t know was that their program was about eighteen months ahead of the timetable predicted in the press, and that the whole thing had been kicked off with technology sold to them, and overseen, by the Russians. The Cold War was far from over—it simply had a new mailing address.

  The CIA analysts were convinced to a high degree of confidence that Iran already had nuclear bombs. Maybe ten of them. But those bombs would be much smaller than the unit in the photo. They would be tactical nukes built into warheads. It was a scary fact of political life, and it’s why the United States did absolutely nothing in direct support of the various waves of antigovernment unrest. And, it’s why they let the hikers rot for a year. If it wasn’t for the danger posed by leverage on Senator McHale, Echo Team would never have crossed the border.

  So … okay, look at that. The hikers were collateral in the nukes thing; but the nuke in the picture isn’t an Iranian nuke. It was probably of Russian manufacture, in whole or part, but the Russians were sharing a sleeping bag with Iran and if Rasouli wasn’t lying, then this bomb was positioned as a threat against Iran.

  “So whose nukes are they?” I asked Ghost.

  He wagged his tail because that’s what dogs do. They’re too polite to interrupt.

  Blowing up the Mideast oil field was a pointless act of destruction. Where was the advantage? How did that make a political statement useful to anyone involved in either the oil wars or the religious pissing contest?

  And Violin? Who and what was she?

  The fact that Rasouli knew Hugo Vox made all of my math fuzzy. This whole thing could be a Seven Kings beach party, in which case trying to sort through the lies to find the truth would be like trying to pick fly shit out of pepper.

  I sighed. I had way too many questions and so far … not one single answer.

  Ghost suddenly turned at a sound and then trotted into the other room. I didn’t hear a knock, but Mr. Church’s asset was due any minute. Maybe Ghost heard him on the stairs.

  I reached for a clean shirt and was pulling it on when I suddenly heard two sounds that chilled me.

  The first thing I heard was Ghost letting out a single savage bark of warning.

  Then I heard a sharp yelp of pain. The sound was instantly cut off.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Golden Oasis Hotel

  Tehran, Iran

  June 15, 9:53 a.m.

  I came out of the bathroom at a dead run and slammed into a figure in dark clothes and a hood.

  We rebounded from one another, and for a weird moment I thought it was a ninja and that I was in a very bad movie. Then I saw that his clothes were ordinary black pants and a baggy shirt, and his mask was a simple balaclava.

  The eyes that glared at me through the opening in the mask were weird, though. Really weird. They were a luminous red—like a white rat’s eyes—with long slitted pupils like a snake’s. Obviously contact lenses, and probably for the dual purpose of disguising his looks and trying to spook his opponent. If I was the kind of guy to stand there and gawp at him, I’d be dead.

  Ghost lay twitching on the rug by the front door. Two metal fléchettes were buried in his pelt and electricity coursed into him through silver wires that trailed up to a Taser the man held at arm’s length. The attacker spun and tried to pistol-whip me with the Taser.

  I ducked the swing, came up fast from the crouch and smacked him over the ear with an open palm. It’s a useful blow that hurts like hell and jolts the balance, but if he was hurt, it didn’t show; and his balance didn’t suffer at all. He reacted by dropping the Taser and punching me in the ribs hard enough to lift my feet an inch off the floor. He tried to combine it with an overhand hammerblow, but I chopped it aside with my elbow. My ribs were white hot with pain, but I let that simply stoke the fury that had been burning in me since Rasouli ruined my morning. I wanted to hurt something that would scream, so I pivoted and drove at him with a flurry of precise strikes and nasty low kicks.

  He matched me like we’d rehearsed this, blocking and parrying, slipping and evading every single strike; and he foot-jammed all my kicks. Then he found a hole in my attack, ducked in low and fast and drove a two-knuckle punch into my solar plexus. It missed the xiphoid by an inch as I turned away from it, but another white hot flare of pain exploded in my torso.

  The punch almost dropped me. That one glancing blow was so immensely powerful that it sent me reeling halfway across the room.

  That gave him a bigger hole, and he launched himself at me, snapping out with a vicious front kick that I barely evaded by turning and dropping into a three-point crouch. He landed and pivoted and his second kick was a side thrust that missed my knee by half an inch and shattered th
e heavy wooden leg of the desk chair. This guy was slimmer and shorter than me, but damn if he wasn’t strong.

  I hooked my fingers around the slatted backrest of the chair and swept it off the floor, catching him solidly on the shoulder. The blow knocked him against the wall, but he rebounded and shattered the chair with a backward sweep of his arm. I threw an arm up to protect my eyes from the splinters; but even as I did that I did a backward kick and caught him in the stomach with my heel. I put a lot of torque in that kick and it should have knocked him out and given stomach cramps to his whole family back home.

  All he did was grunt.

  I mean … holy shit. A full-grown silverback gorilla couldn’t have stayed on his feet after a kick like that. My kick did exactly jack squat.

  Well, not entirely true. It made him mad. And it was no fun to discover that up till now he hadn’t actually been trying to kill me. The Taser and his first selection of attacks were meant to disable. Now he was pissed, and he drove at me, stabbing at my eyes with his fingertips and trying to crush my throat with the stiffened webbing between index finger and thumb. The vicious prick fought like I did—only he was a lot stronger and a whole lot faster.

  And I am really frigging fast.

  So I changed the game and barreled straight at him, wrapped my arms around his thighs and picked him up to drive him right into the cheap wooden dresser which exploded into a shower of splinters, socks, and underwear. We crashed down onto the floor and I tried to slam his head into the broken base of the dresser, but he kicked up between my legs, catching me on the butt and knocked me headfirst into the wall. I got my elbow up in time to save my skull, but it left my side open and he punched straight up and caught me in the gut.

  As I staggered away from that, he kicked out with both feet and sent me flying back onto the bed. He was up before I finished landing and he pounced on me. The force trampolined us off the mattress and down on the far side between the bed and wall. The attacker put a knee on my chest and cocked his fist for another of those pile-driver punches of his, but I grabbed the edge of the night table and jerked it down into the path of the punch. His fist hit the table, and for the first time he reacted. He yanked back his fist and cursed.

  Not in Persian. Not in any Middle Eastern language. It sounded Italian but wasn’t, and though I couldn’t quite understand it, his words seemed strangely familiar. It was like trying to understand Portuguese when all you knew how to speak was high-school Spanish.

  In the split second while he flexed his injured hand I saw a few inches of bare skin in a gap between his glove and his sleeve. There was a small tattoo, less than an inch long. It was shaped like a cross but made from a longsword standing vertical with a horizontal dagger as the guard. That image overlaid a red circle the color of a drop of blood. A word was written above it, arching over the image, but it wasn’t in English and I didn’t recognize the alphabet.

  No time to ponder that now. I pulled my knees sharply up and then kicked him in the chest with both heels. He flew backward onto the bed and fell off on the other side. I scrambled up and flipped the twin mattress on top of him, then threw myself on top of it like a kid doing a cannonball into a pool.

  That tore another grunt from him. Louder, filled with more pain.

  I liked that effect, so I jumped up and down a few more times.

  But on the third drop he shoved up on the mattress and my body landed on a slant. I fell one way and the force sent him the other way.

  We got to our feet three yards apart, our backs to opposite walls. We were both panting now, though even with the pounding I’d just given him he looked fresher than I did. The bastard.

  “Where is it?” he said, this time in heavily accented English. His voice was low and raspy. A mean, nasty voice.

  I knew what he wanted. I figured that much out when we started this dance.

  “Fuck you,” I said. Actually, what I said was “Vaffanculo, testa di cazzo.” Even if he was speaking some weird regional dialect of Italian I was pretty sure he’d catch my meaning.

  He did, and as expected he didn’t much like it.

  His red eyes flared with murderous rage and rushed me. I tried to stall him with a kick, but he swatted my foot aside, grabbed me by the shirt, and threw me across the room. I crashed into the wall hard enough to knock the cheap paintings from the wall; then I crashed down on the floor.

  You see guys in movies do that—pick someone up and throw them across the room. That’s the movies. In the real world, it can’t be done. Not with someone my size. Not fifteen feet through the air so that I hit the wall at head height. It is not physically possible for a human being to do that.

  My brain kept telling me that as I crashed to the floor in a heap.

  I rolled onto my hands and knees and spat blood onto the floor. There was a piece of tooth there too. Fireworks exploded in my eyes and my head felt like it was cracked in forty places.

  “Where is it?” he demanded again as he stalked toward me. Then he did something weird—even when added to the other weird stuff that was going on. Ghost was sprawled on the floor between us, and when the man suddenly realized that he was about to step on Ghost’s tail, he jerked his whole body sideways to avoid contact. A small, guttural cry escaped his throat as he did so. He rattled off something in that weird language, touched his heart, and drew a line with his fingers above his eyes. It had the same ritual feel as Catholics crossing themselves, though I’d never seen this gesture before. The Cop part of my mind wanted to make sense of the gesture and the man’s strange aversion to touching Ghost, but the Warrior was running the show, even though he wasn’t doing a great job of it, and that anomaly got buried under the need to survive the moment.

  I tried to get up, but too many things hurt.

  “What is on the flash drive the Murshid gave you?”

  “The what?”

  “The Tariqa,” he bellowed. “The Saracen! Where it is? Where is the flash drive?”

  “I shoved it up your ass—why don’t you go look for it.”

  He kicked me in the side and I barely managed to tuck my elbow against my side to save my ribs. Even so, the kick knocked me against the wall and the impact ignited more starbursts in my head.

  “Who are you working for?” he said. His anger made his eyes seem to catch fire. “Are you Rasouli’s dog or are you working for that whore?”

  “No,” I groaned as I fought to get to my knees, “your mother hasn’t called me.”

  He tried for another kick, but I was ready and I rolled away from it and got shakily to my feet.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” he said, his voice heavy with contempt. He spat out another word, loading it with bile. “Arklight!”

  I had no idea who or what that was, and now didn’t seem like a good time to ask. Running seemed like the best option, but my legs were rubbery and the room was doing a tilt-a-whirl around me.

  Ski mask snarled at me. “Tell me or I will cut off your balls.”

  “What the fuck is it with you guys?” I demanded. “How come every psycho in the Middle East has a grudge against my nutsack?”

  I think he actually smiled, though all I could see was the crinkle around his crimson eyes. Then he rushed at me so fast that his body seemed to blur, hands reaching to grab. I tried to parry him, but he slapped my hands away, clamped his fingers around my throat and picked me up. And I mean all the way up so that I hung suspended with my feet inches from the floor.

  Again, for a guy his size and a guy my size, this simply was not possible.

  He bent close so that those unnatural eyes were inches from mine. His hands were as cold as ice.

  “Last chance,” he sneered. “Where is the flash drive?”

  “Fuck you. Where are the nukes?”

  He paused for a moment, and I could see that I’d both hit a nerve and said the wrong thing.

  “You know…” he breathed. Then his red eyes flared with rage that was ten times hotter than before. “Listen to me, you piece
of shit—you have no idea what you are interfering with here. Give me the flash drive, tell me exactly who you’ve told, and I will end this quickly for you.”

  “Or,” I choked out, “you could go piss up a rope.”

  His eyes grew hotter still. “I am doing God’s work, and if you don’t tell me what I want to know I will rip your throat out and drink your life.”

  Okay, I never heard that one before.

  Not in real life.

  I had a couple of witty comebacks for him. Stuff about his mother and livestock. But I thought that I was losing my audience. So instead I kneed him in the nuts as hard as I could. I put all of my pain and rage and fear into it. The impact canted him sharply forward, so I grabbed his head and clamped my teeth on his nose and tried my absolute best to bite it off. Blood exploded through the fabric of his mask, splashing against my face as cartilage collapsed between my teeth.

  He screamed—so high and shrill that it hurt my ears. Then he started thrashing and tried to pull his head back from my teeth, but I wasn’t about to let go. I growled at him, clenched harder, and whipped my head back and forth like a dog. Hot blood gushed into my mouth.

  His screams hit the ultrasonic. He flung me away from him and staggered back, pawing at his ruined face with both hands. I slammed into the wall again and dropped hard to the floorboards on knees and palms. The blood in my mouth was hot and tasted of salt. I gagged and spat it out. Part of his nose and the lower half of his mask flopped onto the floor.

  Screw fair play. Screw the rules.

  The man reeled and thrashed, slamming into one wall and then the other, keening in a high-pitched wail of inarticulate agony. His mask hung in dripping shreds. Most of his nose was gone. His mouth and chin were slick with dark blood.

  I got shakily to my feet, sick and dazed. I figured I had him now if I could manage one more really good hit. Maybe break his neck, or crush his hyoid bone.

  Then the son of a bitch wheeled toward me and hissed. His lips peeled back as he bared his teeth.

  Suddenly the whole world froze and in that fragment of time I stared at his mouth.