I reeled away from Grigor and went toward the sound of the battle, but I kept hitting the walls.
I heard a woman’s voice. Familiar.
“Grace!” I yelled.
That’s what I thought I said, what I tried to say. But my words came out slurred as I wandered sideways on feet that no longer understood their purpose. I made it as far as the metal stairs, but when I tried to step down I forgot how my feet worked. I fell. Rolling, tumbling, hitting the metal, spilling and sprawling as the cavern swirled around me.
I don’t remember landing.
I thought I heard voices. More knights? No … was it the cold voice of Mr. Church speaking in the meaningless language of the knights?
My dead mother smiled at me from behind the stacked crates, her eyes weeping blood.
Rudy whispered in my ear, “I was so sorry to hear that you died, Joe.”
I said, “No!”
But the darkness said, “Yes.”
I fell forward into its embrace.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Four
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 6:43 a.m.
I heard someone calling from the other side of a wall. The wall was a million miles high and made of darkness.
I thought I heard a woman speaking. She was close, kneeling beside me, whispering in my ear, but her words made no sense.
Then silence.
A moment later …
“Cap’n? Jesus, Cap’n … are you dead?”
I knew that voice. Male, gruff. Filled with emotion. But I had no label to hang on it.
Dead?
“No,” I thought, or perhaps I said it aloud.
Then there were hands on me. Another vampire? I screamed and tried to fight them off.
“Watch!” barked another voice. “Hold his arm. Hold him.”
My wrists were caught. One, two. Held, though I fought against it.
“Hold him!”
“I am holding him, Farmboy!”
“Christ, he’s a mess.”
I tried opening my eyes, but the world was filled with lights that were too bright to look at. Then someone forced my eyelids open and let the burning sun blast me.
“Look at his eyes!”
“They’re hemorrhaged. Concussion … might be a skull fracture.”
I wondered what that was. I knew that I should know.
More hands on me, under my arms, lifting. Pain was a defining characteristic of the whole universe.
“Watch his head.”
I heard a dog barking. Funny. I used to have a dog when I was a kid, but he died. How could he be barking now?
“He’s coming out of it … watch, watch!”
“Top, hurry the fuck up. They’re coming!”
A rattling sound. Loud pops. Some screams too. I wondered what movie we were watching.
“Warbride … get those cocksuckers!”
Pop! Pop! Pop!
I had the weirdest sensation, like I was floating along on just the toes of my boots. Gliding.
More pops and bangs.
“Go—go! I’ll hold them here. Get him out of here.”
No, I tried to say. I wanted to see the movie. I tried to pull away.
“Don’t let him go!”
“Juice him, damn it. Give it to me. I’ll do it, give it to me.”
There was a pinpoint of cold heat on the side of my neck.
And then nothing again.
This time the nothing was wonderful. If it was death, then I liked it.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 7:49 a.m.
I woke up in a truck that smelled of diesel oil and fertilizer. The first thing I was aware of was pain.
Everything hurt.
Every.
Single.
Thing.
The worst was my head. It felt like the Hindenburg after the fire started. Even my eyebrows hurt.
I opened my eyes but everything was a pale and uniform white. No details at all.
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 pus
hed 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 countersigned 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, M
r. 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.
Assassin's Code Page 46
