At his teeth.
Good God.
His teeth were all filed to razor-sharp points. Like the teeth of a shark. But the canines—something was wrong with them. Really goddamn wrong. They weren’t just sharp, they were too long. Way too fucking long. Like the fangs of a dog. Or a wolf.
Or—
No. My mind refused to make that connection. It was insane and the day was already out of control.
And then the sharp-toothed, no-nose freakazoid son of a bitch pulled us right back into the real world.
He reached into a pocket and produced a gun.
Nothing weird or alien. Totally ordinary.
He had me and we both knew it.
So I let out a scream that was louder than his and I drove into him at full speed and force. It was a big, meaty impact that knocked blood from his face so hard it spattered the walls and ceiling. The gun went flying over my shoulder. Even then he tried to step out of it, but I had him and together we crashed through the glass door and all the way to the wrought-iron balcony. We hit the railing five flights above the empty street. There was glass and curtains and broken pieces of wood-framing everywhere, and even with all that we kept jabbing and punching at each other. Those jagged teeth bit the air, snapping at my face, my throat.
I shoved him back and then smashed him across the mouth with my elbow, exploding half his teeth over the rail and down into the street five stories below.
And still he fought.
Despite all of the injuries, the torn face, he spun me around and started bending me backward over the rail. I could feel my spine bending too far and too fast even while I wailed on him, smashing ribs and eyebrows and knocking more teeth out of his mouth.
Then suddenly his head jerked away from me like he’d been pulled by a rope. I heard a crack as his neck snapped, and saw a geyser of blood and brain matter splash against the shattered window frame, painting the floor and overturned mattress.
His body spun away back into the room, and he collapsed down onto the ruined bed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
I never heard the shot that killed him. But I threw myself into the room and dove behind the bed.
Had the shooter been aiming for him?
Or had they tried to shoot me and missed?
Chapter Thirty-Two
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:46 a.m.
I lay there, panting like a marathon runner five feet from the finish line. Everything hurt, every inch of skin, every muscle, every nerve. I was drenched in sweat and blood, but I remained motionless, trying to hear an echo from a distant shooter.
But there was nothing. No sound except my own labored breaths.
The dead goon’s pistol lay on the box spring, but it was in direct line of sight from the window. I had no gun, no weapons in the hotel room. Why should I? After all, I was a tourist on vacation here in Tehran. All of my tactical gear was slag on the street outside the police station.
I tried to melt into the floorboards, waiting for the next shot, for the next round to punch a hole through the wall and through my body.
My attacker lay in a twisted sprawl. The shot had taken him in the left temple and the exit wound had blown most of his head off. A big damn bullet, traveling at three thousand feet per second.
I waited.
Nothing.
I waited some more.
More nothing.
Across the room, Ghost chuffed and twitched. His ribs rose and fell as he fought to swim back to consciousness.
The memory of the dead man’s teeth kept lunging out of the shadows in my mind, trying to eat away at what sanity I had left.
Gradually I decided I was waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen. The shooter was almost certainly gone by now, not after a kill. Not in a security-obsessed country like this one. The shooter was in the wind. I had to get out of this room, though. Couldn’t risk going outside yet. The basement had a nice, quiet laundry room. Good place to lay low for a few minutes at least until Ghost was able to travel.
The Warrior part of my personality was howling for blood; but the Cop part of my brain was analyzing what just happened. Or at least as much as was possible with a body that felt like it had been thrown down an elevator shaft and a head full of loud noises and thorns.
I grabbed the corner of the box spring and pulled it toward me until it tipped, sending the pistol sliding into my hand. I shoved it into my waistband at the small of my back. Then I wormed my way across the floor to the shooter. I had to risk reaching into the sniper’s line of fire to grab the guy’s foot, but I darted my hand out, clamped my fingers around his ankle and dragged him away from the window.
It was a wasted effort. I searched his pockets and got nothing. No jewelry, no scars or marks. All I got for my efforts was a better look at the tattoo, which told me nothing more than it had when I first spotted it. I pulled up his sleeve and used the camera in my cell to take a photo of it. It was written in an alphabet that was unknown to me, which was odd because I’m a student of languages. I speak a lot of them and can recognize a lot more. This wasn’t anything I’d ever seen.
The dead man’s mouth hung open and I could see his remaining front teeth. I took photos of them, too. Inside my chest my heart skipped a couple of beats. At close range those sharp shark teeth did not look like they’d been filed down. They looked like they’d grown in that way. I tried to pull one of the fangs loose, hoping that it was a fake. Some kind of combat denture. Something cosmetic. After three tries I yanked my hand back and wiped it on the rug.
I will rip your throat out and drink your life.
Hearing someone say that was bad enough, but people in my trade tend to talk all kinds of over-the-top trash. Fine. However, having someone with fangs say it is a whole different thing. You didn’t just shake that off. Even though I knew—knew—there had to be a rational explanation, no matter how exotic the science, it still hit me harder than it should have. It was so weird, so real that it awakened an atavistic dread that took me all the way back to the cave. Like I was some grunting Neanderthal huddling by a meager fire while outside strange and unnameable sounds came out of the midnight darkness.
My inner voices—Cop, Warrior, and Civilized Man—were all silent. Afraid to speak to me, unable to tell me what to do.
“Joe Ledger,” I told myself, “you have got to get the hell out of Dodge.”
I said it aloud because I needed to hear my own voice sounding nice and normal. It didn’t. I sounded scared and shaken and that didn’t help a goddamn bit.
I got to my feet and fell right down on my ass again, and the sound provoked a weak woof from Ghost. His eyes were still closed, though.
Next time I tried to get up I did it slowly. My hands were shaking and they were ice cold.
Making sure to stay away from the window, I bent and dragged Ghost out into the hall and kicked the door shut. None of the other doors on my floor opened, which was the plan. When our local contacts had picked this hotel for Echo Team they’d rented all the rooms just to leave them empty. Most of the floor below me was empty too. No witnesses, no curious faces peering out from between cracked doors. I doubt anyone knew about what had just happened except the sniper, me, and whoever sent the son of Dracula in there.
There was nothing in the room that I needed more than I needed to get gone. My cell was in my pocket, but now was not the time to make a call. Besides, I think my hands were shaking too badly even to hit speed dial.
It took Ghost another minute to wake up and two more before he could stand. As soon as he was on all fours, we crept down the back steps to the laundry room. I wanted to clean us both up and get myself together before we went looking for a safe house.
Ghost had his tail between his legs and in my way so did I.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski
Munich, Germany
June 15, 9:54 a.m.
The you
ng man sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the pistol he had just finished loading. It was a slim, lightweight .22. Easily concealed, simple to operate. He had used guns like this for years. He had killed with them. Men and women. Many of them.
He even knew most of their names.
The fact that he did not know all of their names was like a nail in his head. The floor around the bed was littered with crumpled up sheets of paper on which lists of names had been scribbled. On the first few sheets, the names that he could remember were written in a neat, flowing script. On the more recent ones they were scrawled in haphazard fashion. More than once the tip of his pen had gouged into the notepad, cutting fresh pages like blades on flesh.
The young man knew about that, too. He had used knives more than once.
Even a garrote.
The most recent page lay crumpled on the floor between his bare feet. Beside it lay yesterday’s bottle of Scotch. Today’s was in splinters at the base of the wall where it had been thrown.
There were other bottles too. The room was a disaster, the trash can the only place uncluttered by discards. It stood empty, like a statement, by the open refrigerator door. Inside the fridge, a week’s worth of leftovers had become worlds for new life forms, and the odor was appalling.
The young man did not care.
“Dr. Sirois!” he shouted suddenly, remembering another name. With fevered hands he began his list again. Seventy-eight names now. Seventy-eight.
He wrote them as carefully as trembling fingers would allow. As neatly as his mind would allow, but by the time he was halfway done the list even he couldn’t read most of what he’d written. He’d lost count somewhere in the forties and tore the page from the pad, crushed it in his fist, and hurled it as far as he could.
Then he screamed.
“Seventy-eight, you sodding freak!”
Seventy-eight was too much. He knew that. Too many deaths. Too many murders. Far too many to atone for. There was no way anyone could be forgiven for that many deaths. A saint would burn for half as many, and he knew that he was far, far from that kind of grace.
Seventy-eight. Too many.
But not enough. There were more. He could remember them. He could remember the trigger-pulls, the plunge of blades. But why couldn’t he remember their names?
He screamed again, an inarticulate plea to a God he knew would not spit on him.
When the phone rang, his screams died in the humid air of his hotel room. There was a ghost of an echo, and then silence.
Until the second ring.
The young man stared at the phone.
Not the hotel phone, which had been silent since he checked in three weeks ago.
Not at his personal cell phone, which lay smashed on the floor under the shoe he had used to destroy it.
No, this was the other cell. A bright purple one with a ruggedized rubber shell. The one he had picked up a hundred times, ready to make a call, ready to beg for forgiveness, but which he had put down each time.
The phone kept ringing.
It had not rung for weeks. Not since he had left the private villa that sat in the shade of the Kolakchal Mountain, Jamshidiyeh Park in Tehran. Not since he had been caught reading the encrypted computer files. Hacking those files had taken months. Reading them had broken his heart. Being caught reading them had resulted in a terrible fight. Shouts, hard words, and a single punch—the hardest the young man had ever thrown—that left the owner of those files dazed and bleeding on the floor. The words that man had said as the young man backed away from the horror of what he had just done—those words had opened up a fissure in his mind. They had broken something that the young man knew could not be mended.
Maybe not even by God Himself.
The purple phone kept ringing.
On the eleventh ring, he answered it. He did not speak, did not say hello, did not ask who was calling. There was only one person who could possibly have this number.
“Toys,” whispered Hugo Vox. “C’mon, kid … say something for Christ’s sake.”
Toys bent forward as quickly and sharply as if he had been punched in the stomach.
“Toys!” begged Vox. “Are you there?”
Into the phone he said, “No.”
And he disconnected the call.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Private Villa Near Jamshidiyeh Park
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:59 a.m.
Hugo Vox drew in a ragged breath and let it out through his nostrils, feeling his whole body deflate.
That single word.
No.
Vox stared at the coded cell phone on his desk. It lay beside a bottle of Scotch and a tumbler that was nearly empty. Vox snatched up the glass and drained the last of the Scotch, shivering as the ice rattled against his teeth.
He refilled the glass, drank half of it, set it down.
His sleeve was still rolled up and he looked at the injection mark, then touched the others beneath his shirt. They still hurt, but other things hurt worse.
“You miserable backstabbing little fuck,” he said aloud. The house, however, was empty. Toys had been gone a month now, and Vox knew that he would never be back. On the computer monitor in front of him was the log-in screen of the bank to which he’d wired the billion he’d given to Toys after the Seven Kings fell apart. One hundredth of the assets Vox had in over seven hundred global markets, banks, and trusts. When Toys had left him, Vox had been determined to switch all but a penny out of it. That would have made a statement, sent a message.
So far he hadn’t done it, even though he logged in to the banking site as often as six or seven times a day.
The fact that he could not yet do it irritated the shit out of him.
“You goddamn Judas,” he growled. It was far from the first time he’d said that.
What troubled Vox most was his own reaction to Toys’s betrayal. He should have been doing an Irish jig instead of sulking. Toys had found exactly what Vox had wanted him to find. Upier 531, the Upierczi, the Holy Agreement. All of it, exactly as planned. Vox still could not understand why Toys had reacted so … weirdly. This was exactly the sort of thing Toys had been involved with his whole adult life, first as Sebastian Gault’s personal assistant and since then as Vox’s protégé and unofficially adopted son. This was Toys’s fucking heritage. All he had to do was join him for this last little bit of fun and the kid would have access to the other ninety-nine billion dollars.
How could anyone piss on that?
He closed his eyes and remembered the fight they’d had.
* * *
Vox had been in the kitchen at their villa, removing cardboard containers of takeout food from a cloth bag and placing them on the table. Humming to himself, happy with the way things were going with Grigor, and with that numb-nuts Charlie LaRoque. When he heard Toys open the cellar door, he looked up and smiled.
But the smile died on his lips.
“What the fuck—?”
Toys stood swaying in the doorway, his eyes red-rimmed, cheeks streaked with old and new tears. A pistol hanging limply from his hand, the barrel pointed at the floor.
“Hey, kiddo,” Vox began, “what’s—?”
Toys tossed a ring of keys onto the counter. Duplicates for the keys to Vox’s office and the cabinet with his computer files. Vox shrugged; he’d known that Toys had made dupes. There were faint smudges of wax on two of the keys from where Toys had made impressions for copying.
“So what?” he asked.
“Upier 531.”
Vox removed a container of rice from the bag. He glanced from Toys to the pistol and back again. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? What kind of question is that? You think I want to die?” demanded Vox. “You think I’d let myself rot if there was a way out?”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” said Toys. “You know it isn’t.”
“What do you think it’s about? What’s it ever about? You we
nt into my banking records, right? You saw the deposits and the transfers. Christ, is this about the split? Are you turning on me over your share?”
“It’s not about the money.”
“The fuck it’s not about the money, you little shithead,” Vox fired back. “Okay, so I promised you a hundred billion when I died, and I’m not giving you a hundred billion ’cause I’m not fucking dying. Those injections are giving me a new shot, kiddo, and I’m fucking taking it—and I’m keeping the money I earned because now I’m going to have a chance at spending it. So, boo hoo, I’m a bad man. Are you trying to tell me you can’t live off of one billion? Are you standing there and telling me that? You wouldn’t have a fucking dime if it weren’t for me. I treated you like my own son, you ungrateful shit. I’m giving you a billion fucking dollars, though. Who else ever gave anyone that kind of cash? It’s already transferred to your account.”
“It’s not about the money,” Toys repeated, his face growing red. “It’s about where it’s coming from.”
Vox barked out a harsh laugh. “Oh, please, do not even go there.” He paused and shook his head. “Look, don’t think I don’t know that you’ve been getting all moody and guilty lately. Ever since Gault died you’ve been watching way too many televangelists. It’s creepy and it’s silly, but I figured if it works for you, then who am I to tell you how to whitewash your soul. It’s your money now, and a billion dollars buys a lot of forgiveness.”
In two quick strides Toys closed the distance between them and struck Vox across the mouth. Not with the pistol. He used his open hand, a single whipcrack of a slap that spun Vox violently around and sent him crashing into the table. It tipped under his weight and Vox fell amid a torrent of exploding cartons of food and cutlery. He landed heavily, his face and chest splattered with hot soup and rice and cooked lamb. Vox screamed and slapped at his skin. But before he could recover, Toys bent down and shoved the barrel of the pistol hard against Vox’s temple.
“Shut your mouth,” whispered Toys in an icy hiss. “So help me God, Hugo, if you say one more word I will kill you.”