Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

I grunted. “What made you call Vox in the first place? To arrange this meet, I mean.”

Rasouli showed me his expensive white teeth. “I had been troubling over how to proceed with this matter when the reports came in about the ‘hikers’ being liberated. There are several countries that have teams capable of such an action, but most of them would not risk it, even for as staunch an ally as the United States, therefore it must be an American black operation. Who knows more about that sort of thing than Hugo Vox? I knew that he would know who was responsible and I made a call. He already knew about the action. He did not tell me how, though we are both adult enough to accept that he must still have operatives active in the United States covert community. He gave me you, and now we are here.”

“What would you have done with the flash drive if there had been no drama last night?”

“Have it sent by private courier to your embassy, I suppose. Addressed to Mr. Church.”

I took the drive and closed my fist around it, but I nodded toward his phone. “The photo you showed me? If your agents haven’t put eyes on this thing, then where’d that come from?”

“It was on the drive, too, but I never got the chance to ask how my agent obtained it. There are several badly damaged image files. This is the cleanest one.”

We sat for a moment, looking at each other while so many unsaid things swirled around us. I mean, think about it. Here was a guy I would have gladly killed ten minutes ago. Without hesitation or remorse. I could have cut his throat and then gone to work with a light heart.

And now?

I opened my hand and studied the flash drive. An ordinary device, probably bought at whatever passes for Staples in this part of the world. Now it’s little memory chip was filled with horrors beyond imagining.

Nukes. Under the Middle East oil fields.

“So that’s it?” I asked. “You-pardon the expression-drop this bomb on me and walk off?”

“That is a disingenuous remark, Captain. I risked much coming here. My president and the Rahbare Mo’azzame Enghelab do not know that I am here.”

“And you don’t entirely trust Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader? Wouldn’t they have the same fears as you? I doubt they want to reach paradise atop a mushroom cloud.”

Actually, I deliberately mispronounced his name as Armanihandjob, but Rasouli did not so much as crack a smile.

“I am not in their inner circle,” he said with a philosophic shrug. “They know I have ambitions and the president in particular would not cry if I was found dead with my throat torn out. Besides, in government nothing is as hard to protect as a state secret. They have people that they trust, but I do not know if I can trust the same people.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but you have to admit that it’s pretty weird that you’re bringing this to us.”

He cocked his head at me. “You may neither believe nor care, but I respect Mr. Church. And you, if what I’ve heard about you is true.”

I said nothing.

Rasouli smiled. “I am not fishing for a reciprocal compliment.”

“Good thing. Fishing hole’s pretty dry.”

He shrugged, then asked, “Tell me, do you know the name Salah-ed-Din Ayyubi?”

“Sure. Saladin. General during the Crusades.”

“He was a sultan,” corrected Rasouli. “A great man, a hero of Islam.”

“Wasn’t he a Sunni born in Iraq?” I asked with a smile.

Rasouli shrugged. Iran was no friend of Iraq and 95 percent of Iranians belong to the Shia branch of Islam.

“My point is,” he persisted, “Saladin viewed the world from an eagle’s perspective. What you would call a ‘big picture’ view. It was never his desire to exterminate his enemies, only to defeat them and drive them from the Holy Land.”

“Ah. So, we’re supposed to shake hands like two worldly wise warriors, setting political differences aside for the betterment of mankind. Is that about it?”

“Something like that,” he said without a trace of embarrassment.

I nodded and shoved the flash drive into my shirt pocket.

Rasouli looked down at his shoes for a moment, breathing audibly through his nostrils. Without looking at me he said, “There is one last thing. It’s also on the drive.”

“More bombs?”

He shook his head. “I am not entirely sure that it is related to this matter, but then again I’m not entirely sure it isn’t.” He tilted his head and cut an upward look at me. “What do you know of the Book of Shadows?”

“Isn’t that a CD by Enya?”

His mouth twitched. “What about the Saladin Codex?”

“Nope. What are they?”

He turned toward me now and his eyes looked different. Older. Sadder. “They are two sides of the same very old coin.”

“Meaning?”

“As you do not know what they are, then it is all I’m prepared to say at this point. Mr. Church will see the references on the drive. Perhaps he will know if they are pertinent.”

Rasouli stood up and offered me his hand. I stood and looked from it to him.

“I know you despise me, Captain Ledger, and I do not care much for you. For now, however, we must rise above our individual beliefs and politics and do what we can for the common good.”

“You’re not Saladin,” I said. “And I’m sure as hell not Richard the Lionhearted.”

The hand did not move.

So, I shook it. Fuck it. It didn’t cost anything except a little pride and disgust, and I had a bottle of Purell in my pocket.

“Remember,” he said, “that you have been instructed to wait for ten minutes after my departure before leaving this coffee shop.”

With that he turned and left. Feyd opened the door for him and gave me a single withering stare, which I managed to endure without dying of fright. I stood by the glass and watched them walk around the corner of the building out of sight, presumably to a waiting car.

The next ten minutes took about ten thousand years.

Driving in the City

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 8:17 a.m.

The passenger in the limousine rolled up his window as the tall American agent stepped out of the Starbox. The limousine idled one hundred feet down the side street, mostly hidden by a sidewalk stand selling dried lentils and wheat flour. The American agent looked up and down the street and then turned away and headed in the direction of the hotel district.

The passenger slid open the glass door between the front and rear seats. “Sefu, follow him. We need the name of his hotel but for God’s sake don’t let him see us.”

“Sir,” grunted the driver. Sefu was an Egyptian Christian who had worked for many years in this man’s service. He was not in the habit of letting anyone spot him when he tailed them, though he was circumspect enough not to say so. He put the car in drive and eased into traffic three cars back from the one closest to the American.

In the rear seat, Charles LaRoque, a French businessman and one of the world’s leading brokers of fine Persian rugs, pushed the button to close the soundproof glass partition. He cut a look at the rearview mirror to assure himself that the driver was not watching him, then he fished a small compact mirror out of his pocket. He opened it to reveal that both top and bottom held small mirrors. LaRoque studied his face in one mirror and then the other, back and forth for several moments, tilting the compact and changing his expression over and over again. A strange little laugh burbled from his chest.

“Delicious, delicious, delicious,” he said to the alternating images. There was so much to see there, so many faces. His father and his grandfather. The trickster and the priest. The Red Knights with their red mouths. The King of Thorns. It was all so very delicious.