“Interesting in what way?” Rudy asked, beating me to the question.
“The archangel Michael has a dual nature. His name is a symbol of humility before God and at the same time he is regarded as the field commander of the Army of God.”
“Ah, so we’re talking militant psycho vampire hunters,” I said. “Groovy.”
Church added, “Michael is also one of the very few angels venerated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.”
“Did Michael have problems with vampires? If so, I missed that in Sunday School.”
“Not likely,” answered Circe, “but as the leader of God’s army he would naturally be the enemy of all evil. Going on the assumption that vampires are evil.”
“The Red Knights get my vote for being evil. So are these vampire hunters,” I reminded her. “Krystos and his asswipes tortured innocent people and were quite willing to kill me. Oh, and here’s another thing to throw into the mix. Krystos said that he was with the Holy Inquisition. Even had their motto tattooed on his forearm.”
There was a silence.
“No,” I said, “that wasn’t a joke. Say something.”
“How does one respond to that? I … thought that had been disbanded a couple of hundred years ago,” said Rudy.
“Sure, and vampires were myths,” I pointed out.
“Ah,” he conceded.
“It’s always good to keep an open mind,” Church said quietly.
“Are we tracking any groups whose symbology includes a vampire motif?” I asked. “Some weird cult? Anything like that?”
“Only two,” said Church. “The Red Knights and another group that may be the same as your Inquisitors.”
“Let me guess … the Saturday People?”
“What?” asked Circe. “They’re Sabbatarians?”
I said, “According to Krystos.”
“Sabbatarians,” she repeated, “are people born on Saturday.”
“So what?” I asked. “So was my nephew. He doesn’t run around stabbing people with pointy sticks.”
“No, in folklore the Sabbatarians are monster hunters. The old beliefs come mostly from Greek legends, but it’s found in other places, too. People born on the Sabbath are supposed to have special powers. They can see evil spirits and they are empowered by God to oppose supernatural evil.”
“Were they connected with the Inquisition?”
“I can check, but I don’t know. That’s not to say they weren’t. We’re paving a lot of new ground here,” Circe admitted. “I have a colleague, Jonatha Corbiel-Newton, she’s probably the world’s top scholar on vampire legends. I’ll call her and pick her brain. Covertly, of course.”
Rudy sighed. “Until five minutes ago I thought we were looking for nuclear weapons. Now we’re hunting vampires.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “This is definitely one case, but don’t ask me how they relate. We came into this wa-a-a-y too late to make sense of it without a guidebook.”
“So it seems,” said Church. “Here’s the rest. Vox is definitely connected with this matter at several points. Some of that intel comes from a source connected to the woman, Violin. When you have more time I’ll give you a more complete briefing, but for the short term, Violin is considered a friendly.”
“She saved my life, so I’ve got some fuzzy bunny feelings for her.”
“She is part of a deep-cover special ops group operating independently of any government. Their code name is Arklight. They have no political or national affiliation and very few friends. Their story is a long and very sad one. If the situation requires it I’ll have Aunt Sallie give you a briefing. Their leader uses the code name Lilith. She’s fierce, highly dangerous. Underestimate her at your peril.” And then he filled me in on what he knew of the Red Order, the Scriptor, the Tariqa, the Murshid and, saving the best for last, he dropped the bomb about Nicodemus.
“That’s it,” I said. “I quit.”
Church ignored me. “A lot of what we know is in bits and pieces. Let me make some calls and see if I can get more useful information. In the meantime, Captain, get what you can get out of Krystos, but don’t take too long with it. You eliminated their team, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have backup. Unless Krystos has direct knowledge of the nukes, he is a distraction rather than a pathway to a solution. Find out what he knows and then get out of there. I’ll call around and when I can verify a genuinely safe safe house, I’ll text the information to you.”
“Good. Before I go … where are we on the flash drive and the nukes?”
Circe and Rudy gave me the bullet points of what they’d found. Church wrapped it up by saying that field agents were working to verify the four known targets, and to remind me that Echo Team was already inside Iran and heading my way.
“First good news I’ve had all day,” I said, and disconnected. I pocketed my phone and leaned against the wall for a moment.
“Vampires,” I said aloud. There was no doubt in my mind that, as Rudy observed, this was probably some freak of genetics. I believed in God, but, contrary to what Mr. Church said, I didn’t much believe in angels, demons, or monsters. Ghosts? Maybe. Vampires of the supernatural kind? Nope; and the word still didn’t fit right in my mouth.
Chapter Sixty-One
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 1:14 p.m.
When I came back to the living room, Ghost was standing over Krystos, growling right in the man’s face. Krystos cringed back as far as he could but he was trapped by a hundred pounds of furious canine.
“Down,” I snapped.
Ghost stopped growling but he held his ground, the hair standing stiff along his spine.
“Down!” I said again, but this time my tone was quiet. Ghost glared at me and uttered another low, threatening growl. There was no danger left anywhere else in the house. The growl was aimed at me.
“Down,” I repeated a third time, and after another moment of hesitation he lowered himself to the ground, but all of his muscles were tensed as if he was about to spring. I deliberately turned my back on him, the way a confident pack leader would. At the moment I wasn’t feeling all that confident. Dogs are smart, but when they’re hurt and confused their thinking can get dangerously skewed. From Ghost’s perspective, his pack leader was leading him into one painful situation after another.
Once more I squatted down in front of Krystos. I interrupted him in the middle of a prayer. His color was bad and he sat in a puddle of his own blood. I reached out and felt for Constantin’s pulse. He didn’t have one, and I felt a weird flash of irritation that he’d managed to duck out before we could have a meaningful chat.
Krystos watched me do it and read the news on my face. He closed his eyes for a moment and repeated the dead man’s name several times. Greasy sweat ran in rivulets down Krystos’s face.
I poked him on the forehead with a stiffened finger. “Pay attention, sparky.”
“I am praying for the dead!” he snapped.
“Did you pray for the people upstairs?” I snarled.
He faltered. “Yes. I … I mean that the others would have done this.”
“Before or after they tore out their fingernails?”
He looked at me with eyes that were glassy and bright. “They are the enemies of God!”
It was so hard not to yell back, to try and shout him down and make him understand that nobody’s God orders something like this. I wanted to make my case; I wanted to knock some sense into him. But—really, what would be the point? How could I ever make someone like him budge from an entrenched stance that was hundreds of years in the making and backed by a papal order? This wasn’t one of those debates where I could slide around to try to see things from his perspective. As the saying goes, that way lies madness.
The rage was hard to keep in its box, though. It burned in my mouth and in muscles, and it tingled like electricity in the dangerous tips of my fingers. When I trusted myself to speak normally, I asked, “Who told you I w
ould be coming here?”
“I—I don’t know,” he said. “We got a call. My team was ordered to come here to do God’s work and—”
“Who made the call?”
“I don’t know.”
I searched his face for the lie but I think he was too scared to pull any new stunts on me, and unfortunately that meant that he was probably no more than a grunt. A foot soldier in a war that was out of step with reality and with my real mission. The nukes.
“How many more of you are there?”
His mouth tightened with either pride or defiance. “Enough.”
“Don’t get cute with me.”
“We are the Army of God,” he declared. “We will never stop hunting. We will never cease in our war.”
He said all that in awkward, broken English, but I got the point. I wasn’t impressed.
“All of this is because you want to rid the world of vampires?”
“No—not that. That is not our mission. We want to save the world from the Upierczi.”
“Upierczi? That’s another word for vampire, right? So, with all that’s going on in the world—wars, poverty, religious intolerance, disease—you ‘priests’ spend your time and resources hunting vamps?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I demanded. “’Cause right now I’m thinking you psychopaths have done a lot more harm to the world. What makes you better than them?”
His face took on a contemptuous cast and with an imperious tone, he said, “We fight to save the world. They want to destroy it.”
“And how do they plan to do that?”
“They want to blow it up.”
I sat back on my heels and stared at him. Again he read my expression and he nodded.
“The Upierczi have hidden for centuries,” he said. “Now they are in the light. Now they attack openly. They have great weapons. Why else do you think they would reveal themselves to the world?”
“What do you mean by ‘great weapons’?”
“Great,” he repeated, letting me take the obvious definition from that.
Oh shit.
“How do you know this? Are you working for Rasouli?”
He looked blank.
“Hugo Vox?”
Krystos shook his head. “I do not know these names.”
“Who sent you here?”
“A priest of our church. He will know what you have done here. He will call down the wrath of the Almighty on you.”
His accent was atrocious but his message was clear enough; but I wasn’t buying. I’m pretty sure I could handle myself against a priest.
“I’ll take my chances,” I told him, but he sneered.
“Father Nicodemus will lay waste to your world. He has promised this!”
That, I thought, was mighty damn interesting, and it made me wonder whose side Nicodemus was on. There was Nicodemus with the Seven Kings last year. Nicodemus with the Red Order, and now Nicodemus with the Sabbatarians who were clearly enemies of the knights employed by the Red Order.
Who in hell was Nicodemus?
I left the room once more to call this in to Church, but got Aunt Sallie.
“What the fuck are you still doing at that house?” she bellowed.
“Trading Pokémon cards with the vampire hunters.”
“Why are you calling?”
When I told her about Nicodemus, Auntie shut up for a moment, then said, very grudgingly, “Good work. Now get out of there.”
“I wish I could spend some more quality time with this clown to see what else I can get.”
“If wishes were horses,” she said.
“Yeah. Tell you what, Auntie, much as it sounds goofy to say out loud, I think we need to take a look at this from the vampire doomsday perspective. I’m starting to think that maybe the Red Knights have the nukes.”
“We will, but I doubt whether your friend Krystos had that right. Circe and Dr. Sanchez have forwarded the idea of a doomsday cult.”
“You don’t buy it, though?”
“Do you?”
“No, but my logic is kind of goofy.”
“Big surprise,” she said. “Tell me.”
I said, “Answer me something first. Circe dismissed the changing into bats stuff, and we know that bullets kill the knights, so that’s two bits of folklore down the crapper. But, what do the reports you’ve collected about the Red Knights and real-world vampires say about immortality? That’s supposed to be a real theme with vampires, right?”
“Nothing lives forever, but from what little we know about the Red Knights, they’re supposed to be exceptionally long-lived. Not necessarily immortal, but with lifespans far exceeding ordinary humans.”
“Okay, so they’re immortal-ish. Enough so for the sake of argument, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Then tell me why immortals would want to destroy the world. No way that makes sense.”
Aunt Sallie grunted. “This isn’t like you, Ledger. This is very clever thinking. Let me run it by Deacon and Dr. Hu. In the meantime, Deke wanted me to text you. We have a safe house location that has been triple verified. It’s close to where you are now, and Echo Team will meet you there in a few hours. It’s an apartment over a convenience store. Deacon knows the man who owns it.”
“One of his ‘friends in the industry’?”
“No, just an old friend. Jamsheed Mustapha is a good man. We’ve worked with him in the past. Good guy, so try not to get him killed.”
I let that pass. “What about Krystos?”
Auntie said, “That’s your call.”
She disconnected.
I still had the phone in my hand when I went back into the living room. Krystos looked at me with mingled hope and dread, but his mouth continually repeated a prayer of deliverance.
“Well,” I said, “turns out that it sucks to be you.”
I shot him through the heart.
Chapter Sixty-Two
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 1:18 p.m.
The gunshot made Ghost bark again, but it was a single sound. Loud and shocked and angry.
I ignored him as I watched Krystos slide slowly onto his side, eyes emptying of light, mouth hanging slack with his last prayers unfinished.
None of the thoughts inside my head were pretty ones. However, when I looked inside for self-recrimination I came up dry. That’s something I knew I should be worried about, and I was pretty sure that all of this was going to come back and bite me on the ass, at least in an emotional or psychological way. At the moment, though, I watched Krystos die and did not feel a single thing about it. Not for him or the six other Sabbatarians. They were ordained priests; they were official Holy Inquisitors acting on orders given by a pope centuries ago. They believed that what they were doing was right, that they were doing what they had to do to save the world.
From vampires.
Vampires with nukes.
I closed my eyes and imagined for a moment that I stood in a cool breeze that was scented with lilacs and honeysuckle and just a hint of salt water. I strained to hear the soft whisper of Grace speaking my name.
But there was nothing.
When I opened my eyes, though, it was only me and Ghost in a house filled with ugly death. Ghost looked at me and I couldn’t meet his eyes. I hung my head and told myself that the stinging in my eyes was from the gunpowder.
Yeah.
Before we left the house I dropped the magazines from the two nine millimeters and swapped bullets until I had a full magazine in one and a half-filled mag in my pocket. I took Nadja’s .25 popgun, too, and the valise that was filled with stakes, hammers, garlic, and holy water. Who knows, maybe I’d really need them.
Lingering in the doorway to the hall, I glanced down at the dead man and spat on the floor by his shoes.
“That’s for Taraneh and Arastoo Mouradipour, you piece of shit,” I said quietly. And although it was true, I felt a hollow place in my chest. I’d just shot an unar
med man, a man who was injured and bound, and I’d made a joke about it as I pulled the trigger. It made me feel like a piece of shit.
My phone rang again. No ID. I didn’t answer. Instead I headed toward the door, clicking my tongue for Ghost. After a moment I heard nails clicking on the floorboards.
Ghost followed right at my heel.
We went out the back.
There were two cars out back. I debated taking one, but there was no time to do a proper search for trackers or other bugs, and I already had enough problems.
I did rummage around, though. I found half a chicken sandwich on flatbread and gave that to Ghost, who didn’t even bother to sniff. He attacked it as if it was trying to escape. As he ate, he cut me some hard looks, letting me know that we still had some issues to work out.
The first car had nothing else in it.
In the second I found a locked briefcase under a blanket on the rear seat. The locks were good and the case was reinforced. No time to jimmy it now, so I decided to take that with me. I popped the trunk and stood staring for a ten count at a full-blown arsenal. Six AK-47s with bundles of magazines held together by heavy-duty rubber bands, two rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and a small duffle bag of 1980’s-era Russian hand grenades. The underside of the trunk lid was rigged with slots for a dozen of the stakes and four hammers. These guys were serious about this. I took some party favors and slammed the trunk.
Ghost finished his sandwich and looked up for more.
“Sorry, kiddo, but that’s all I have.”
His look of disgust eloquently showed how deeply disappointed he was in me. Man’s best friend indeed.
There was nothing else to find.
“Let’s go,” I said softly.
We did not exactly run, but we walked mighty damned briskly away from there.
Interlude Eight
Krak des Chevaliers
June 1203 C.E.
Sir Guy LaRoque stared at death.
And death, in its many forms, stared back at him. The big stone fireplace blazed and threw its dancing light across the floor, and yet the shadows of the vast hall were not chased back. Rather they recoiled like some dark serpent, ready to strike the unwary.