That made the Scriptor pause. Santoro was the chief assassin of the Seven Kings, a man whose utter ruthlessness was only equaled by his nearly matchless skills as a combatant. Santoro was one of the very few ordinary men who might stand a chance against a knight. Not a full-blooded knight, of course, but one of the trainees.
“Ledger killed Santoro?”
“I … don’t know,” admitted Vox. “All I know is that they fought and then Santoro was gone, off the radar. And it’s not the first time Ledger’s beaten the odds. Don’t risk a Sabbatarian team. You have the Red Knights. Use one of them.”
The Scriptor looked at the two aspects of his face in the mirror, angling the compact one way and then the other, back and forth as the silence grew. The bottom mirror showed his own weak mouth, the top showed his indecisive eyes.
“Charlie—?” prompted Vox.
LaRoque flipped the mirrors forward and back, over and over again until the top image changed. From one heartbeat to the next the image changed from his own reflection to the face of the priest. Wrinkled skin, a slash of a cruel mouth, and eyes that were a strange swirl of colors—leprous brown and ophidian green.
Do it, whispered the voice in his mind. The voice of the priest.
LaRoque took a steadying breath. “Very well, Hugo, I’ll do it. I hope you appreciate the great faith I’m showing by trusting you.”
A snort of laughter came down the line. “You’re showing great intelligence by trusting me.”
“Others might disagree, considering what happened to your organization.”
“Nothing happened that I didn’t want to happen,” Vox said with a little edge to his voice. “I used Ledger and Church to turn a losing situation into a winning one.”
“Winning?”
“Am I in jail? Am I dead? Fuck no. Did I stroll away with a hundred billion dollars in numbered accounts? You bet your left nut I did. Am I still raking in about a couple of mil a week from that shit? You can bet your right nut on that one. So, yeah, I put the DMS to work for me and they don’t even know it.”
“Not even Church?”
“Maybe Church,” Vox conceded after some thought, “but he can’t do jack shit about it. He can’t want to kill me more than he already does. So, call me when Ledger’s dead.”
Vox disconnected.
For several moments LaRoque held the phone to his ear with his right hand and stared at the face of the priest in the compact mirror he held in his left.
Then it was gone. LaRoque blinked. The mirror now held only his own reflection.
“You made the right choice,” said the priest.
The Scriptor slowly raised his eyes and stared at the wizened figure who now sat across from him in the back of the limousine. The priest had eyes the color of toad flesh, and his skin was as sallow and thin as old parchment. When he smiled, his teeth were white and wet.
Charles LaRoque smiled back.
“Thank you, Father Nicodemus,” he said.
Chapter Twelve
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 8:28 a.m.
I walked back to the hotel, and with each step I tried not to scream. I wanted to run back, but I didn’t dare draw attention to myself. It was bad enough I was sweating and probably looked nervous and guilty. There were so many ways this could play out, most of them bad, and I didn’t know how we were going to play it.
Inside my head the word “nuke” kept echoing.
About every third car on the street was either a police sedan or a military jeep. Even though the rescue of the hikers wasn’t in the morning papers, it was clear from the activity on the street that the government was mobilized. Although the hikers had been illegally arrested and unfairly held, Iran had never budged from its stance that the kids were spies and that they’d crossed the border. At the time Echo Team went wheels-up to come here, the State Department had not yet decided how to announce the event. A lot of it, I knew, depended on whether we were successful, on the physical and mental condition of the rescued hikers, on the degree of resistance during the raid, and whether we got caught. The mission had gone by the numbers except for the end; and though I had no doubt Top had managed to get the kids out of the country, at least one American still had boots on the ground here.
If John Smith or Lydia had missed their rides, then the math got more complicated. The local government needed only one of us to create a media shit storm. The fact that there wasn’t yet that storm suggested that none of my people were in the bag. I did not want to be the one to let the team down; and I had no illusions about Church dispatching a team to haul my ass out of jail. There was no political profit in that. He’d disown me and wipe my records.
That’s exactly as comforting as it sounds.
I knew that Church was advising the president and the secretary of state about how to spin this thing. Spin control for global disasters was one of his most endearing talents.
And, of course, there was the whole nuke thing. Talk about skewing the math. Rasouli oversaw much of the nation’s misinformation and propaganda and he was the one who wanted me to find the nukes. Did that mean he was influencing the manhunt process? No one had a physical description of me, at least no one attached to the rescue; but Rasouli and his sniper psycho babe were able to spot me and put a laser sight on me at a coffee shop. How’d that happen? Even with Hugo Vox advising them, how’d they know where to acquire me?
“Joe,” a voice said.
I spun around, sure that someone stood right behind me, whispering in my ear. But I was alone on the street. The voice … I knew that voice.
Her voice.
“Grace?”
My heart was pounding and the ground under me felt like it was tilting. But there was no one close enough to have spoken my name.
Chances are that no voice spoke and that I was crazy as a loon. Chances, not guarantees.
Grace.
I searched for the echo of her voice, of that one word, inside the fractured darkness of my mind, but it, like she, was gone. Tears wanted to burn their way out of my eyes. I wanted so badly to find a place of shadows, a doorway or the back of an abandoned car, somewhere I could hide. Ever since Rasouli dropped the first two bombs on me—Hugo Vox and Grace Courtland—I felt like things were starting to unravel inside my head. It made me feel as if everyone was looking at me, as if everyone knew who and what I was.
I used every ounce of strength and will I possessed to compose my face and show absolutely nothing. It cost me, though.
The Israelis operated a news and cigarette shop a block from my hotel and I stopped by there and browsed the papers until the shop was empty. Then I drifted over to the counter. The man who ran the place looked and sounded Iranian but I knew for a fact that he was Mossad.
“Carton of cigarettes,” I said. “Do you still carry Bistoon?”
He smiled. “We get no call for it, I’m sorry.”
It was the proper call sign and response that identified me as an American agent. We both glanced around the shop to verify that we were alone.
“What do you need?”
“Cell phone battery.” I showed the phone I had, which was a DMS design built on a local model. Even though my unit had some extra goodies built in, it was designed to work on a standard cell battery that could be found anywhere in Iran.
“I can have it for you in half an hour. Will you wait or do you want it delivered?”
“Delivered.” I told him my hotel and room.
He studied my face and frowned. “I will not ask what is troubling you, my friend, but it appears that you are having a bad day.”
“You have no idea.”
Before I left I bought a pack of goat jerky. I had a hungry dog waiting for me in my hotel and if I didn’t come back with food he’d sulk all day.
I paid for the goat.
“May your day improve,” said the shopkeeper.
“Yeah,” I said from the doorway. “Here’s hoping.”
As cops and soldiers cruised by and peered at every civilian with suspicious eyes, I forced myself to walk normally. I willed myself not to be noticeable. I needed to punch and pound the fear and grief and paranoia down into its little box. Walking a few blocks seemed to take absolutely forever. By the time I reached my hotel my hands were shaking so badly I had to jam them into my pockets.
I climbed three flights of stairs, dropped my keys twice, and finally opened the lock. As soon as I was inside I closed and relocked the door and fell back against it with an exhale that came all the way up from my shoes.
My dog, Ghost, was waiting for me, wagging his tail and looking at my hands to see if I’d brought him anything. He’s a big white shepherd, 105 pounds of muscle and appetite. Ghost was cross-trained in a variety of useful skills from combat to rescue; and though he was useful in ordinary bomb detection, he couldn’t disarm a nuke.
I knelt down and hugged him. I kissed his furry head.
“This one’s going to be a bitch, fuzzball,” I told him.
He looked at me with those liquid dog eyes that always seem deep and wise. He whined a little, catching my mood or perhaps smelling my fear. Then his whole body went rigid as he stared past me. Not to the closed door, but to an empty space on the wall. I followed the line of his gaze, willing myself to see what he saw, but a dog is a dog and they see things we can’t. No matter how much we want to.
I listened to the silence, wondering if I’d just heard a soft voice whisper my name again.
But, no … there was nothing.
When I looked at Ghost, he was no longer staring at the wall.
“What is it, boy?”
Ghost, being a dog, just looked at me.
I mean, really … what had I expected him to say? My palms were sweaty and I wiped them on my thighs. Then I fished some dried goat strips out of my jacket pocket and dropped them on the floor. Ghost is peculiar in that he eats his food delicately, one piece at a time, making it last.
Minutes crawled by as I waited for the Mossad shopkeeper to send over the battery. The thought of those moments being chipped off the block of time remaining until those nukes went active was making my heart hurt. I was sweating and it wasn’t the heat in that stuffy little room.