Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

“Wow,” said Rudy. “You got all that by looking at this for twenty minutes? You always impress me, my dear.”

“No,” interrupted Circe, “that’s just it, this is too fast. Too easy. It’s like we’re being handed too much too soon.” Again, Bug was nodding along with everything she said.

Rudy frowned. “Isn’t that was Rasouli was trying to do?”

“Yes,” conceded Circe, “and I might have been less suspicious if the drive was intact. What troubles me is the fact that the drive was damaged and yet there are a lot of very key pieces here.”

“Exactamundo,” agreed Bug.

“It doesn’t make sense, though” Circe said, then quickly corrected herself. “No-it does make sense, but only if the person placing those files on the drive knew that the drive would be damaged.”

“Yup.”

“No, that’s wrong, too,” murmured Aunt Sallie. “Damage from moisture is random. Does this mean that the files were added after the flash drive was removed during the autopsy?”

“I don’t think so,” said Bug. “In fact I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.”

Rudy asked, “Admittedly I don’t know what I’m talking about, so forgive me if this is a foolish question, but… we can’t actually be certain that the drive was really swallowed by Rasouli’s agent, can we? So, could the moisture damage have been deliberate?”

Bug grinned so hard his face looked ready to explode. “Bingo!”

“Okay, boy genius,” said Aunt Sallie, “tell us.”

“I could do it,” said Bug. “In fact I’m really, really, really sure that someone else who is almost as smart as me did exactly that.”

“Almost as smart?”

Bug sniffed. “If I did it, no one would ever have figured it out.”

“Arrogance is a serious personality flaw,” said Rudy, but he was smiling.

“The whole package here is a little too cute,” said Bug. “Either Rasouli thinks we’re pretty dumb, which isn’t likely; or he thinks we’re really smart. I’m going with that, because layer after layer he’s giving us useful stuff, but stuff only we’d figure out. I mean, I’d buy the whole ‘this was damaged’ business if there were more bits of useless junk, but there’s hardly any of that. Almost everything we have is useful in some way.”

“Which is statistically improbable,” added Circe.

“Why the subterfuge?” mused Rudy. “If the drive was deliberately damaged, should we infer that Rasouli is double-crossing us in some way?”

“Possibly,” said Bug. “At the same time, I don’t think he knows enough. By fragmenting the data he has, it tells us a lot while at the same time possibly disguising all that he doesn’t know.”

“Why go to such lengths?” asked Rudy. “He reached out to us for our help.”

“Politics,” suggested Aunt Sallie. “He’s an ambitious little bastard. Maybe he found a way of strengthening his position within Iran, or maybe within Islam, while still removing a possible threat to his country. The less specific he is with us, the easier it could be to spin the actual outcome in his favor.”

“That’s cynical,” Rudy said.

“Hell, we do it all the time. Spin control is the second most important tool of statecraft, and probably the third most important weapon of war after big guns and strong allies.”

“It’s also devious,” added Rudy. “Very much the Hugo Vox model.”

Circe sighed. “Yes.”

“Do we trust the information?” asked Auntie. “ Can we trust it?”

“Do we have a choice?” muttered Circe.

Golden Oasis Hotel

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 9:42 a.m.

I kept expecting the woman to call back, but she didn’t.

Violin.

I went into the bathroom to pack my toiletries. Ghost came and sat in the doorway, watching me in case I happened to discover a beef bone in my shaving kit.

As I puttered around, I tried to make some sense of the pieces of the mystery I had, but it was like trying to assemble one picture with pieces from four different puzzles. There was the hikers thing. That’s why I was here in Iran. There was no intention or even possibility of any interaction with the Iranian government. I don’t think I had ever spoken Rasouli’s name aloud before today; until now it was only a name in news stories and in a handful of CIA field reports that crossed my desk.

Before Rasouli, there was not even a whisper of rogue nukes. I mean, sure, everyone knows about Iran’s nuclear project-which is not even a “leaked” secret. Iran was behind the first press stories. They wanted the fear of it to give them leverage. What the general public didn’t know was that their program was about eighteen months ahead of the timetable predicted in the press, and that the whole thing had been kicked off with technology sold to them, and overseen, by the Russians. The Cold War was far from over-it simply had a new mailing address.

The CIA analysts were convinced to a high degree of confidence that Iran already had nuclear bombs. Maybe ten of them. But those bombs would be much smaller than the unit in the photo. They would be tactical nukes built into warheads. It was a scary fact of political life, and it’s why the United States did absolutely nothing in direct support of the various waves of antigovernment unrest. And, it’s why they let the hikers rot for a year. If it wasn’t for the danger posed by leverage on Senator McHale, Echo Team would never have crossed the border.

So… okay, look at that. The hikers were collateral in the nukes thing; but the nuke in the picture isn’t an Iranian nuke. It was probably of Russian manufacture, in whole or part, but the Russians were sharing a sleeping bag with Iran and if Rasouli wasn’t lying, then this bomb was positioned as a threat against Iran.

“So whose nukes are they?” I asked Ghost.

He wagged his tail because that’s what dogs do. They’re too polite to interrupt.

Blowing up the Mideast oil field was a pointless act of destruction. Where was the advantage? How did that make a political statement useful to anyone involved in either the oil wars or the religious pissing contest?

And Violin? Who and what was she?

The fact that Rasouli knew Hugo Vox made all of my math fuzzy. This whole thing could be a Seven Kings beach party, in which case trying to sort through the lies to find the truth would be like trying to pick fly shit out of pepper.

I sighed. I had way too many questions and so far… not one single answer.

Ghost suddenly turned at a sound and then trotted into the other room. I didn’t hear a knock, but Mr. Church’s asset was due any minute. Maybe Ghost heard him on the stairs.

I reached for a clean shirt and was pulling it on when I suddenly heard two sounds that chilled me.

The first thing I heard was Ghost letting out a single savage bark of warning.

Then I heard a sharp yelp of pain. The sound was instantly cut off.

Golden Oasis Hotel

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 9:53 a.m.

I came out of the bathroom at a dead run and slammed into a figure in dark clothes and a hood.

We rebounded from one another, and for a weird moment I thought it was a ninja and that I was in a very bad movie. Then I saw that his clothes were ordinary black pants and a baggy shirt, and his mask was a simple balaclava.

The eyes that glared at me through the opening in the mask were weird, though. Really weird. They were a luminous red-like a white rat’s eyes-with long slitted pupils like a snake’s. Obviously contact lenses, and probably for the dual purpose of disguising his looks and trying to spook his opponent. If I was the kind of guy to stand there and gawp at him, I’d be dead.