Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

“Rudy asked the same question.”

“When?”

I couldn’t answer that, and I realized that this wasn’t the same room. “I don’t know.”

“Do you remember the raid on the refinery?”

It took me a long time, and the memories were sluggish and reluctant. “Some of it. Maybe. Did we… did we win?”

Church nodded. “You had the code scrambler. All eight of the devices have been secured.”

“Eight? I… don’t remember eight.”

But then I did. And that memory brought other memories. Church watched my face as each came tumbling downhill at me. Grigor. The army of Upierczi. Everything else.

“My team,” I asked. “John Smith?”

“No,” he said.

“Khalid.”

“No.”

We sat in the silence of that for a long time.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Church said eventually. “They were good men.”

“They were family.”

“Yes,” he said. “They were.”

“What about the others?”

“Everyone else took some hits, but they will all recover.”

In body, I thought, but in spirit? In heart? I had my doubts. There was only so much loss a person could take.

“Ghost?”

“He’s recovering. He needed some work. He had cracked ribs and lost a couple of teeth. I arranged for dental implants. Titanium.”

“How-?”

“I have a friend in the industry,” he said with a faint smile.

There was one more name, but I was afraid to ask; and I vaguely remembered a moment like this with Top. Or was that a dream? Church read it on my face. He shook his head.

“No,” he said.

(2)

Church told me all of it.

The Book of Shadows was deciphered. Circe believed that it was the way the knights confessed their “sins” to God for everything they did to fulfill the Holy Agreement. Each entry was countersigned with the letter N. Nicodemus? Probably. Bill Toomey, the head of our handwriting analysis team, said that the same person countersigned every page, but of course that can’t be right.

Can it?

Toomey was doing carbon dating of the ink on all the signatures. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read his results.

Charles LaRoque was taken out by a Hellfire missile. Very appropriate. When the Iranians picked through the rubble they found three bodies. A driver, the remains of the last Scriptor of the Red Order, and the body of a man whose identity remains a mystery.

Grigor and the Upierczi from Aghajari? Like the song says, it’s all dust in the wind.

There are probably more of them out there. There are always monsters in the dark.

But Arklight is out there too. Hunting them, with the full resources of the DMS at its disposal.

If I were one of those bloodsucking freaks, I’d kill myself before I let Lilith’s people find me. I wonder if monsters have their own version of the boogeyman. I wonder if the thing that they dread when they go to sleep at night looks like a beautiful woman with eyes that hold not the slightest trace of mercy.

Rasouli tried to flee the country, too. Mr. Church made a phone call and even though Armanihandjob was in no way our friend, he was useful as a weapon. Rasouli will probably be in prison until the Middle East becomes a sunny center of tolerance and friendship for all.

Church, the presidents of America and Iran, and a few other key people met in Switzerland to discuss the Holy Agreement. The ayatollahs hoped to edit out Islamic involvement and lay it all on the Christian Church, but that was never going to happen.

“What will happen?” I asked Rudy, when he came back to visit me.

He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing visible. Nothing that will ever make the news.”

“Why the hell not?” I demanded, but Rudy looked at me with disappointment.

“What good could possibly be served by telling the world about this? Do you think it would stop hate crimes? Do you really think that it would end the violence in the Middle East?”

I sighed and turned away from him.

“Of course it wouldn’t,” he said sadly. “It would throw gasoline on it.”

“What happened to ‘the truth will set you free’?” I growled.

He sighed. “As much as I hate to say it, Cowboy, sometimes a lie is better.”

“Ignorance is bliss? Is that our stance?”

Rudy didn’t answer, because there was no answer.

And the world? It didn’t end. It still leans heavily on a crooked axis, and it still turns.

But as the weeks passed I saw something I hadn’t expected.

Throughout the region the guns have fallen silent. Tensions are down across the Middle East. No one exactly knows why. At least, no one in the press seems to know.

Without gasoline on the fire, maybe the fire is finally going to burn itself out.

That would be nice.

We’ll see.

(3)

Violin?

They never found her body, of course.

Burned, they said, along with so many others. Human and vampire. Charred to dust, blown away by the hot winds of an unforgiving desert.

I saw Lilith, very briefly, at the joint-use base. She wouldn’t even look at me.

Everybody needs somebody to blame.

Maybe she’s right to pin it on me. Violin wasn’t just looking for the scrambler. She came looking for me. She told me that much, and it’s all we ever got to have.

(4)

The name on the young man’s passport was Gerald Hopkins. He did not look at all like the person he had once been; no one he had ever known would be able to pick him out of a lineup. People who had known him last year couldn’t even do that. The face and fingerprints of Gerald Hopkins matched the computer records. No bells or alarms rang. The airport security officers in Germany did no more than an ordinary search of the man and his possessions before passing him through.

“Have a safe flight, Mr. Hopkins,” said a cheerful man at the gate.

“Thank you,” said Hopkins, but he was not smiling. He found his seat and buckled in and sat staring out the window for the entire flight. He did not fly first class.

When his plane landed in Canada there was no one to greet him. He hired a cab and, except for the name of his hotel, Hopkins said nothing at all on the drive. The hotel was a modest one, second or third tier. He checked in, locked his door, set his bags down and spent the next full day sleeping.

When he woke up, he stumbled into the bathroom and stood naked for half an hour under the hottest spray he could endure. His skin screamed and he screamed. But the spray was loud and the walls were sturdy and nobody reported it to the front desk.

Later, he ordered room service, and while he waited he looked out at the skyline of Montreal. His mind was a furnace.

When the porter knocked, he opened the door and stood looking at the floor while the young man set up a table and laid out the meal. Hopkins gave him some cash and locked the door again when he was gone.

The food was cold before Hopkins finally sat down to eat. He removed the metal cover to see how the steak had been cooked.

There was no steak. The plate was clean. But it was not empty.

Instead there was a folded piece of paper.

Hopkins rushed to the door and checked through the peephole, but the hall was empty. He parted the curtains, but he was on the ninth floor and there was no one down on the street that looked like police or military. No SWAT.

Cautiously he crept toward the table and the note.

He was sweating, heart hammering as he picked it up.

The sheet was a single piece of legal-size computer paper folded into a small square. Hopkins carefully unfolded it. Most of the sheet was given over to a printed list of charity organizations around the world, the majority of which were devoted to poverty, clean water, and other humanitarian causes in third-world countries. None of them were high profile. Nothing that would get headlines.