Assassin's Code (50 page)

“It’s disgusting,” I said.

She nodded. “Over the centuries, though, even the Upierczi have come to believe some of it. Their leader, Grigor, believes himself to be a true immortal, a kind of dark angel. There have been Upierczi who have gone mad because they began believing that they were actually monsters. They collapsed in terror at the sight of the cross or the Eucharist. Propaganda is a powerful weapon.”

“Yes, and that’s the sort of thing Vox loves to play with. God help us all if he ever starts working directly with the Upierczi. It’s bad enough he’s screwing around with Rasouli and LaRoque.”

“I agree. If he was with Grigor, we’d be doomed.” She glanced down at Ghost. “Do you know why the knight who attacked you in your hotel room did not simply kill your dog?”

“I’ve wondered about it.”

“The knights are afraid of white dogs. There are many legends about the magical powers of white dogs. Vampire hunters have used them for centuries to find the graves of vampires. A lot of cultures, especially the Greeks, have always believed that dogs can foresee evil. And of course there’s the legend of the fetch dog.”

“The what? I keep hearing that word. What is it?”

She looked up, surprised. “I thought you knew about that. The Sabbatarians of legend had magical powers and they traveled with a dog called a ‘fetch’ who lived wholly or partly in the spirit world. The fetch dog could sniff out evil, which the Sabbatarians would then dispatch using various magical means. A
white
fetch dog would be exponentially more powerful than any other kind. This legend has been heavily reinforced over the years by Sabbatarian hit teams bringing trained attack dogs with them. The Upierczi—even the ones who do not believe themselves to be evil—know of many cases where a fetch dog was used to kill one of their kind.”

“So why didn’t the knight kill Ghost?”

“Oh,” she said, flexing her fingers in Ghost’s fur, “they can’t do that. Fetch dogs belong to God. They are to dogs what saints are to humans. To harm one is to incur the wrath of God and all his angels.”

I smiled. “Great, now that Ghost’s heard that he’ll be insufferable.”

Violin gave Ghost a final pat and stood up. The shadows around us seemed to create an opaque screen between us and the reality of what we were really facing. Or about to face.

“When this is over…” I said, and let it hang.

“Yes,” she said. “When it’s over.” She looked away, her eyes filled with sadness.

“No,” I said clumsily, “I meant when this thing tonight is over. Not the war. I don’t want to wait until the end of the war to get to know you.”

She took a tentative step toward me. And another. She was so beautiful, so powerful in the way that a woman can be powerful. I’d known her for less than a full day. Longest day of my life, but still less than a day. I wanted to know her for a lot of days, for years.

I looked into her eyes and saw—or thought I saw—my thoughts mirrored there. Can it be like that? Love at first sight is a romance novel myth. Isn’t it?

Violin took another step toward me and I moved to meet her. She was tall, almost tall enough to look me straight in the eyes. She touched my cheek with one strong, soft hand.

“Joseph,” she said and suddenly she was in my arms. I could feel the heat of her breath on my face as she went up onto her toes, and I bent toward her, our hearts hammering, mouths open.

Then panic instantly flashed through my brain and I pushed her away and staggered back, colliding with Ghost who gave a sharp startled bark.

“No!” I gasped, clapping a hand over my mouth.

Violin gaped at me for a horrible moment. Then her face twisted into a feral mask of fury. “I told you I was a monster,” she hissed and she turned to run, but I darted out a hand and caught her arm. She surprised me, though, and wrenched her arm out of my hand.

“Stop!” I yelled.

She did, but her eyes were filled with hurt and anger.

“Listen to me,” I said sharply. “It isn’t about you. It’s because I don’t want to hurt you.”

“No, you heard what I was and—”

“Violin—before I left the other warehouse I ate an entire bag of powdered garlic. That’s why I’ve been chewing gum. If I kissed you now…”

She studied my face, looking for the lie, her whole body still tensed to run. And then a smile slowly blossomed on her face. It was like seeing the sun coming up over the mountains. It lit up her features and painted the night in brightness.

“Violin…” I said.

But she threw back her head and laughed, and then she walked away into the night.

In my earbud Top said, “Abdul’s two minutes out, Cap’n. We’re ready to roll.”

“Copy that,” I said with a sigh.

Ghost looked at me as if I was the biggest fool who ever walked on two legs. He was a great judge of character and I could find no fault with his opinion.

Feeling like an idiot, I turned and ran toward the warehouse where my team was waiting.

Chapter One Hundred

On the Road

Iran

June 16, 4:17 a.m.

The plan was for Abdul to take us to an auto repair yard ostensibly owned by his cousin but actually owned by the CIA. He wasn’t happy to see us. He was seriously disgruntled about having a woman along on what he clearly regarded as a “man’s mission.” He said as much in various ways, making sure his comments were loud enough for Lydia to hear. Regruntling him wasn’t high on my list of priorities. If we’d had a lot more time I might have put him in a room with Lydia so they could talk it out and come to some sort of meeting of the minds, though admittedly that would probably end with a meeting between her foot and his nuts. Détente would suffer.

We followed him in the vegetable truck. Even with what we were facing and everything that Lilith had told us—or maybe because of it—everyone was laughing during the trip. Mostly making fun of Bunny, though I finally got some mileage out of “Armanihandjob.” Yeah, I know, juvenile … but as an icebreaker on the way to de-arm a nuke possibly planted by vampires, what do you want?

Abdul led us to the deserted auto repair yard and parked by the vehicle that he would use to drive us into the refinery compound: a clunker of a Chinese Foton diesel truck. It had room for two up front and a big flatbed in the back.

Lydia turned to Abdul. “Unless you got a cloak of invisibility,
cuate
, how are we—”

Abdul cut her off with a curt shake of his head and then pointed. “Of course not,” he snapped irritably. He strode over to the closest box and opened it. True to its label there was a big hunk of machinery in there. Some kind of turbine. However, Abdul fiddled with a metal knob and the turbine suddenly opened with a hiss of hydraulics. It was a shell and inside was a tiny capsule with a bench. Bunny whistled, but Abdul gave him a sour look. “We made these to smuggle in a team of techs to the nuclear power station. To sabotage the centrifuges.” He shook his head. “We spent
three years
developing this plan. Three. Now—
poof!
—it has to be scrapped.”

Top smiled at him. “Did your station chief explain to you exactly what we’re doing?”

Abdul shook his head. “I don’t care. You Americans all think you’re Austin Powers. It’s all bullshit.”

Top, still smiling, bent close and patted Abdul on the shoulder. “I’m really sorry to screw up your plans for recreational vandalism, my friend, but we’re trying to keep your country from getting blown into orbit. So, if it’s all the same to you, you can take your sour feelings and your little pouty face and go piss up a rope.”

Abdul stared at him, uncertain how to react because Top’s friendly and affable smile never even wavered. Then Abdul’s eyes shifted away from Top and swept over the faces of the other members of Echo Team. He wasn’t playing to a friendly crowd.

“Okay, okay, but this is bullshit,” Abdul insisted. His expression suggested that he’d like Top and the rest of us to die in the desert and be eaten by vultures. Three years is a lot of time to invest in anything, but overall my nerves were running so high that, like Top, I managed not to give a shit. You know, the whole nukes thing.

I asked, “What’s the plan to get us into the refinery?”

“These are valuable parts that have been back-ordered for months,” said Abdul. “I have the actual parts here too, and I would have delivered them and waited until these parts were ordered for the nuclear plant.” He waited for us to console him about his great loss, got no love, and continued. “We set it up that way so that when the team was ready we could show up virtually any time of day or night.”

“Good.”

We were out of earshot of the others and Abdul cut me a quick look. He ticked his chin in Top’s direction. “Is what he said true?”

“Unfortunately.”

He sighed and cursed some more, mostly to himself. Or to God. When he had the last shell open he waved the team over and began locking us into the metal capsules. It was uncomfortably like going into a coffin, but it would get us in. I tucked Ghost into one with a rawhide bone and fresh water. It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this, and he was trained for it, though he still contrived to give me an aggrieved look as I closed the door.

Because of space constraints, the cases had to be loaded after we were inside the capsules, so there was a lot of nauseous swaying as the chain hoist lifted us up and a heavy—and perhaps deliberate—thump as the crates were set down into the stake bed. The capsule allowed me to sit straight and move my arms and legs a bit. Standing and lying down were out of the question and after a while—and a few thousand jolts and bumps from the truck—my lower back was starting to sing a sad song. I figured Bunny had it worse than me. Kid was six foot seven, and Abdul had packed him into the crate like a magazine in a gun. Not a lot of rattle room.

We were radio silent, giving a bit of respect to Iran’s military police. They were a long way from stupid. Between their own science and what they bought from China and North Korea, they had an impressive array of security sensors, backed by satellites, hidden detection bases, and a general sense of hostile paranoia.

The Foton had, apparently, no shocks or suspension worth mentioning, and I do believe that Abdul found every single goddamn pothole to drive over along the way. Helluva guy. I’d let him marry my sister, if I had one and didn’t like her.

I spent the rest of the ride going over the de-arming sequences. I have to admit it, though … when the crate was opened and the air of the refinery, reeking of oil and sweat and heat, struck me full in the face, it was a relief.

The crate had begun to feel like a coffin.

Chapter One Hundred One

Aghajari Oil Refinery

Iran

June 16, 4:56 a.m.

The refinery was a crazy house of people. It seemed like thousands to me, running, yelling, pounding up and down metal staircases, moving pallets of fifty-five gallon drums. For them, it was just another day.

There were so many people, and our intel about the daily operations of the refinery were so good—thanks to the now deeply bitter Abdul—that we were able to vanish right into the human herd of petroleum workers. Bug, at Mr. Church’s direction, had hacked into the operations computers here and inserted our work records, IDs, and other data. If someone didn’t recognize us and went to check, they’d find out that we were either just transferred from another rig or had been there for a while but in another part of the massive Aghajari complex. No one took the risk of questioning security officers. Too many of the ordinary cops on rigs like this were actually members of Rasouli’s secret police. This wasn’t Stalinist Russia, but it wasn’t tremendously far away from it, either.

Before we left the storage room where Abdul uncrated us, we synched up and ran through the game plan. We had miles of the refinery to cover. The photo of the nuke showed a poured concrete floor and rock walls, which meant that we didn’t have to crawl around up in the pipes looking for it. However, there was a basement and four subbasements that included endless corridors, storerooms, offices, closets, and even staff quarters, as well as rooms dedicated to water, sewage, electricity, fire systems, alarms, and more. We divided the place into three sections, checked the function of our digital Geiger counters, tapped our earbuds to make sure everyone was on the team channel, and then went to work.

“Okay,” I said as everyone crouched down, “combat call signs from here out. Everyone on coded channel one-eight. Warbride, Ghost, and I will do a sweep of the north half of the lower level. Dancing Duck, you and Chatterbox take the upper levels. Shouldn’t take you long.”

That was true enough. Although a bomb does more damage in an air burst—which could be approximated by mounting it high on the rig—the likelihood of it being there was small. It would be spotted and it wouldn’t do as much damage to the oil, and the oil was a more likely target than a refinery stuck out in the middle of a desert. The upper-deck sweeps were necessary for certainty, though, even if they felt like time wasters.

“Sergeant Rock and Green Giant, sweep the lower levels. If either or both teams come up dry, then rendezvous with me down under. Rasouli’s picture showed a cavern or underground chamber.”

“What if we meet the fearless vampire hunters or those Red Knight goons?” asked Lydia.

“They’re not Iranian nationals,” I said. “No grace for them. So that means one person on each team has a nonlethal gun for diplomacy and the other has live rounds for deal-closing. Chatterbox, Sergeant Rock, and Warbride are the best shooters, so you get to play with the grown-up toys.”

“Hooah,” they acknowledged.

I unslung the bag I carried and opened it. We had used most of the garlic powder and oil according to Jonatha Corbiel-Newton’s instructions, but there was some left. Everyone held their hands up and I filled their palms with powder.

Bunny’s face was screwed up in distaste as he choked his down. “Never eating Italian food again,” he complained. He washed it down with a mouthful of water. We’d been following this ritual for hours now, and I felt like my stomach was churning from all I’d swallowed. I passed around my pack of gum and everyone took a stick.