Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

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.

Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski

Munich, Germany

June 15, 9:54 a.m.

The young 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.