“Then listen closely,” said Church. “Time is critical…”
Chapter Twenty-One
The Kingdom of Shadows
Beneath the Sands
One Year Ago
The King of Thorns rose from his chair and loomed above Hugo Vox. In the dense shadows pale figures crept closer, surrounding Vox with burning red eyes and hungry mouths.
Vox turned in a slow circle, looking at the twisted figures. Some were vastly old, with crooked bodies and crippled limbs; some had the blank moon faces of deeply inbred retardation; but seeded throughout the crowd were creatures like Grigor. Taller, whole, and powerful, their skin the color of milk, their eyes blazing with intelligence and an unnatural vitality that seemed to burn into Vox, threatening to steal away his life and breath.
Vox held up the detonator. “Careful now,” he murmured in a ghost of a voice. “Let’s all be very, very careful.”
“I am not afraid of your bomb,” sneered Grigor. “The Upierczi do not fear death.”
That annoyed Vox and he snapped, “Don’t lie to me, Grigor. Not to me. Everyone fears death. Even monsters like you. And … monsters like me. I’m not here to bring death and you damn well know it. I brought the bomb because I need to speak openly with you. No coy bullshit. We don’t know each other enough for trust, so shared fear is a good platform. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Grigor ran his tongue over the serrated ridge of his teeth.
“Talk,” he said.
Vox took another step, which brought him to within reach of Grigor, but the pale man remained motionless, his eyes glittering.
“The Scriptor and the Red Order don’t give a shit about you unless they need you to do their dirty work,” said Vox. “To do the work they are too weak and too afraid to do themselves. Isn’t it time to stop being their dog?”
Grigor’s eyes seemed to blaze with real heat. “Yes.” He hissed the word, filling it with endless hatred and cold fire.
“Yes,” agreed Vox.
“I know what happened to you. I know that eight hundred years ago Sir Guy LaRoque, the first Scriptor, sought out the Upierczi because the Order had a need for killers. Not any killers, but the best. Better than the Hashashin the Tariqa were using for their part of the so-called Holy Agreement. Nicodemus told LaRoque where to look, and he found an Upier in England, in Newburgh. He found another in France, and more in Italy, Poland, Russia … all through Europe. Not a community of you. Individuals. Hunted, wretched, hungry. Persecuted by the church. Condemned as monsters, as demons, as the unholy. LaRoque brought the Upier back to Nicodemus, and the priest created the Order of the Red Knights. Must have sounded pretty great at the time. To those poor, miserable fucks who had been hiding out in crypts and forests and ruins—to them it must have felt like they were people. Like they mattered. And, I guess they did matter; but only in the way a bullet matters if you want to shoot a gun. That’s what the Upierczi were, no matter what fancy-ass labels the Red Order hand out. Tools, weapons, slaves. For you guys, all three words mean the same thing.”
Grigor gave a single, slow nod.
“But the Order hit a snag with you. Something Sir Guy and Nicodemus didn’t foresee. You guys can’t breed worth shit. There are no female Upierczi, which screws things up from the jump. You guys are genetic freaks, a sideline of human evolution that didn’t pan out. The genes that make you what you are rarely present in females, and when they are the females look human and they sure as hell don’t want to breed with you. Not by choice. That meant that the Red Order had to start a forced breeding program. How many women did they take over all those years? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? More? And every one of them had to be forced. Eight hundred years of rape isn’t a legacy to be proud of.”
Grigor sneered. “They are women. Who cares?”
Vox smiled. “Yeah, I’m the last person to throw stones. Anyway, the breeding program hit some of its own snags. Turns out only one in fifty or a hundred women was able to give birth to a healthy Upier. Most of the babies were—how should I put it? Less than successful? Stillbirths, freaks. Once in a while one of the breeding slaves popped out a half-breed. Always female, though, right? Whaddya call ’em? Dhampyr?”
“Abominations!” The word rippled through the darkness, spoken by a hundred mouths.
“Glass houses, stones. Any of that ring a bell?” asked Vox, amused. To Grigor he said, “The real bitch of it all was that the Red Order focused their breeding program on those few women who could produce Upierczi. They bred them and their children, over and over again, which left a pretty shallow fucking gene pool.” He gestured to one of the Upierczi who had mongoloid features and a vacuous expression in his eyes. “Inbreeding didn’t work for the Hapsburgs, and it sure as hell didn’t work for you.”
“That is the past,” growled Grigor.
“I know,” said Vox, smiling broadly. “I know that really goddamn well, which is why I’m here. Charlie LaRoque’s dad, who was probably one of the better Scriptors, as far as that goes, decided to try something different. Genetics. Gene therapy, gene splicing. Not rebreeding but a careful and deliberate remodeling of the Upier DNA. Very smart, very expensive, and very illegal. Which is how I found out about it, because if it involves science and it’s against the law, I’m always involved, I’m always making a buck on it, and I always find out about it.”
“What is it to you? What is any of this to you? You have the Seven Kings. You are their King of Fear. You are more powerful than most of the governments in the world above.”
Vox reached up, threaded his fingers through his hair, and revealed a bald pate that was blotched and unhealthy.
“I’m a walking dead man,” he said. “Cancer. I’m done. Best-case scenario gives me eighteen months.”
Grigor’s eyes glittered like rubies.
“Nobody knows. Not the Kings, not my mother. Not the Scriptor. Nobody.”
“Why come to me? Do you want a quicker death?”
“No … I want to live. You see, the other thing that I know about is what the scientists discovered while they were engineering the new generation of Upierczi. They cracked your DNA. They found out why you never get sick, why you lucky pricks live for so damn long. They know what makes you as close to immortal as living flesh and bone is ever going to get.”
Vox took a last step closer to Grigor, well within reach.
“I know about the treatment. I know about Upier 531,” he said fiercely. “And I fucking want it.”
“It isn’t for your kind. It would kill you.”
“It might kill me,” corrected Vox. “Or it might make me live forever.”
Grigor laughed. Low and soft. If a wolf could laugh, Vox thought, it would sound like that.
“Why should I give it to you? What could you possibly give me in return?”
“I can give you the whole fucking world, Grigor. I can make sure that no one and nothing can put you in chains again. I can guarantee it.”
“Prove it,” demanded Grigor.
He and Vox stared at each other for a long minute, their faces less than a yard apart.
Vox raised the detonator between them. He turned it over and slid back a small panel on the bottom, revealing a nine-digit touch pad. Vox showed this to Grigor and then slowly and deliberately punched in a complex code. The LED light glowing under his thumb faded to black. Hugo Vox raised his hand, palm out, offering the inert detonator to Grigor.
“All hail the King of Thorns,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:01 a.m.
Knowing that Church was working on finding the nukes was a tremendous relief. Even I don’t have a sense of all the forces he can bring to bear at need. His connections and his political clout are considerable, and he doesn’t allow red tape to slow him down. With Vox in the mix? Well, let’s just say that I pity anyone who got in his way today.
Having handed off the ball, I switched my focu
s to the second part of Rasouli’s message. The Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex. I had no idea what they were and I did not believe for a moment that they were entirely tangential to the nuclear issue. Rasouli had been a little too casual about mentioning them.
I called Bug. He wasn’t good with computers—he was a freak. When 9/11 happened Bug was still in high school, amusing himself by hacking into the school board computer to give everyone he liked a 4.0 average and to put the school disciplinarian on a sex offenders watch list. A couple of years after the planes hit, Bug tried to hack Homeland, believing that if he had access to their data he could find Bin Laden. The next day Grace Courtland and Sergeant Gus Dietrich—Church’s personal bodyguard—showed up at his front door to offer him a choice: jail or a job with the DMS. Bug made the smart choice.
Since then he’d become the high priest in the church of MindReader. And back in 2011 he got his wish by helping track Bin Laden to his Pakistani compound.
He answered the call with: “Hey, whaddya know, Joe? Heard about the hikers gig. Echo Team kicks a-a-a-a-ass.”
“Thanks, Bug, but listen up. Something else is about to hit the fan. The Big Man will be calling you any minute about—”
“I know, the nukes. I’m looking at it right now. Frigging scary as shit, huh?” Bug said with the kind of excitement you hear from video gamers who have found a challenging new level. I sometimes wonder if Bug knew that he didn’t exist in a purely virtual world.
“So you’re already tied up?”
“Nah, this stuff is crap. Got to run it through a bunch of filters and a clean-up program before we can do much with it. That’s going to take a couple of—”
“Good. Then, before you get swamped with that I need you to start a database search for me. It’s part of the nuke thing; but it’s a different arm of the investigation and to tell you the truth I don’t have a clue how it relates. All I have are the names of two books. No authors, no other data.”
“Fire away.”
“The Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex.”
“Saladin, as in the sultan who—?”
“Presumably. Rasouli dropped his name during our little chitchat, so I figure that was some kind of hint.”
“Okay. Wait—there’s something about them on the drive. No … forget it. Stuff’s corrupted as all shit. Reads like some kind of gibberish. I’ll have to see if I can translate it. What do you need?”
“Anything you got. General and specific. I had to dump my tactical computer and PDA, so send it to me via e-mail so I can read it on my phone. You ring any serious bells, call me directly. If I don’t answer, hit scramble and leave it on my voice mail.”
“You got it, Joe.”
I disconnected, and again I could feel another layer of stress crack and fall away.
Ghost came over and leaned against me. He does that. I know it’s more of a greyhound trait and the fuzzmonster is pure White Shepherd, but Ghost isn’t one to pass up a trick that might get him petted. I ran my fingers through his fur.
“I don’t suppose you know how to sniff out a nuclear bomb, do you?” I asked him. “No? Guess I’d better do it.”
He wagged his tail to show that he believed me to be Captain Invincible who could find those pesky nukes and crush them in my hands of steel. That or he thought I had more goat strips in my pocket.
I debated taking a shower and maybe drowning myself. Might be a tension breaker.
Instead I called Rudy Sanchez.
“Cowboy!” he said instead of hello. “Are you home?”
“I wish. Where are you?” I could hear wind rushing past the phone.
“On the way to the Warehouse. Mr. Church called ten minutes ago and told us to come in right away. Can you tell me what’s happening?”
We were both on scrambled phones, so I gave him the highlights.
“Dios mio!”
“No kidding.”
“How are you doing with all of this?”
His question, I knew, had very little to do with the mission and a lot to do with my overall mental health. Rudy and I have a lot of history. When I was a teenager my girlfriend Helen and I were jumped by a gang of older teens. The guys completely trashed me, breaking bones, rupturing some stuff inside. While I lay there coughing up blood they took turns with Helen. That image is seared onto the front of my mind. I see it every single day.
Helen and I healed from the physical trauma. I got involved in martial arts and made myself as tough and as ruthless as I could. Helen wandered down a few dark corridors inside her head and never found her way out.
We met Rudy during his psychiatric residency at Sinai in Baltimore. Helen was having one of her frequent breakdowns and Rudy did some amazing work with her, pulling her back from the brink time after time. He also helped me work on my internal wiring. Unfortunately the darkness was too much for Helen, and one day she let it take her.
I kicked in her door and found her.
Her death nearly killed me. Nearly killed Rudy, too. He’d never lost a patient to suicide before. We were already best friends, and that friendship probably saved us both. Since then we’ve become closer than brothers—certainly closer than I am to my own brother. Rudy is the only person in whom I place total trust.
He’s also the person who helped me make sense of the wreckage in my head. As I healed, I began to realize that I was not completely alone inside my mind. Over time three distinct personalities emerged. One was the Civilized Man, and Rudy says that he is my idealized self, the version of me that I wish could survive in this world. Optimistic, compassionate, nonviolent; and he’s been taking a real beating over the last couple of years as I hunt bad guys for Mr. Church. Then there is his complete opposite, the Warrior. Or, as I sometimes think of him, the Killer. He’s the part of me that was born on that day when the children that Helen and I had been were destroyed. He is ruthless, highly dangerous, and unrelenting. His bloodlust is intense and constant, and although he can be glutted, his hunger will eventually come back. I have to keep a real eye on him, especially while working for the DMS, because the more evil I see in the world the harder it is to rationalize putting him in a cage.
The third personality is the one that I believe truly defines me. The Cop. He’s not a cynic or a wide-eyed idealist. He’s rational, cool, calculating, and balanced. He emerged even before I joined the police; in a lot of ways he has a Samurai vibe. Skilled, but self-controlled.
They’re always with me, and Rudy taught me how to manage them. How to make them more fully a part of a whole rather than disparate entities. I’m not entirely convinced I’ve managed that.
I trust Rudy’s judgment, though. In that and in most things. When I got my gold shield with Baltimore PD, my father—then the commissioner—arranged a consultant’s position for Rudy, which later expanded into a full-time gig. Rudy specialized in trauma cases, which is something he really dug into after Helen’s death. He was in New York after the towers fell, working with survivors and families and with the legion of heroes who risked their lives to search through the rubble. He was in New Orleans and Mississippi following Katrina, in Thailand after the tsunami, in Haiti, and in Japan. He knows that he can’t save everyone, and every lost soul gouges a deep mark into his own soul, but he saves more of them than anyone else.
When Mr. Church hijacked me into the DMS, Rudy became part of the deal. I often think that he does a lot more good with quiet conversations and a patient ear than I do with a pistol. Which is very much as it should be.
“I’m okay,” I said. Rudy grunted, knowing that I was lying. He’d let me get away with that as long as I was in the field, but once I got back home I’d have to fess up. I’d need to by then.
“Joe—Mr. Church called me late last night and told me about the hikers.”
“Yeah.”
“That was well done,” he said. “That one will really matter.”
“All part of the job.”
“No,” he said, but left it there. Knowing Ch
urch, he would probably have Rudy sit down with the hikers.
“Why’d Church call you in on this?” I asked.
“I think he wanted Circe more than me. This is her field more than mine.”
“Not if the nukes go off,” I said.
“Mother of God.”
“Speaking of Circe—how’s she doing?”
Dr. Circe O’Tree was a PhD in a handful of overlapping subjects including Middle Eastern history and religions, cults, anthropology, psychology, and a few others I’m probably forgetting. She has more letters after her name than anyone I’ve ever met. She was also Mr. Church’s daughter, a fact that was shared by only a few people and that I’d only found out by accident. Although Circe now worked for the DMS, she and her father had been estranged for years. I was under very specific orders from Church not to mention the family connection. To anyone. Ever. He didn’t actually come out and threaten to disappear me, but I didn’t want to push the issue.
“She’s wonderful,” said Rudy.
I smiled. I’ve never seen Rudy happier. Even though I hadn’t yet heard him throw around the L-word, whenever he looked at Circe there were little red hearts floating all around him.
“Tell the missus I said ‘hi.’”
“Cowboy,” he warned, but I laughed at him. Laughing felt good. It felt like I was still in the real world.
My phone pinged softly. Someone else was trying to reach me.
“Hey, Rude … I have another call coming in. I’ll talk to you soon.”
I disconnected and looked at the screen. No caller ID. Church said he would have Abdul, our local asset, call me, so I punched the button.
“Hello,” I said in Persian.
“I see you got a new battery for your phone,” she said in English. “Sorry I made you throw out the last one.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:03 a.m.
It was her. Same voice, same hint of an Italian accent. A bit more pronounced now. I fought the urge to check my body for laser sights. There were none, but I moved out of the line of sight of the hotel window.