Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

“Yeah,” said Bug slowly, “that’s where we go out of the blue and into the black. And by black I mean magic. Or, maybe it’s white magic. What do I know from magic?”

“Magic?”

“Uh-huh. the Book of Shadows is the book of spells for witchcraft.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Serious as a heart attack, Joe. What the hell are you into over there? I mean… is the DMS suddenly at war with the forces of darkness?”

I thought about the freak with the fangs.

“Right now, Bug, I’d believe just about anything. Look-keep digging and get back to me with anything you find.”

I hung up and lingered in the alley for a moment wondering if Bug’s information moved me forward toward understanding or pulled a bag over my head.

“Witches. What do you think?” I asked Ghost.

He lifted his leg and peed on the wall.

“That’s what I figured,” I said.

We kept moving.

The Warehouse

Baltimore, Maryland

June 15, 1:48 a.m. EST

“Hey! I got something,” cried Bug as his image popped onto a view screen. His face glowed with excitement.

After signing off with Aunt Sallie, Circe had buried herself in the material from the flash drive, and Rudy had followed her in, picking up the thread of her logic and working with her on the psychological aspects of the case. They looked up from the semicircle of data screens.

“We’re in the middle of something, Bug-” Circe, began, but Bug overrode her.

“I’ve been tearing apart the documents on the flash drive,” he said. “At first there didn’t seem to be anything more than what we already had, but on a whim I matched the volume of data we’ve downloaded against the drive’s storage potential and there was a discrepancy.”

Rudy frowned. “Because some of the files were supposedly destroyed by moisture after Rasouli’s agent swallowed the drive, correct?”

Bug gave him a pitying stare. “Silly mortal. ’Destroyed’ is a relative term. Or, maybe it’s a term people who are a lot less super-genius smart than me use.”

“Bug,” warned Circe quietly.

“Yeah, yeah, okay. There’s more stuff on the drive than was openly indexed, and I’m not talking about real or faked damaged files. I’m talking about stuff that was coded to react like damaged files.”

“You lost me,” admitted Rudy.

“A file name is nothing but a piece of computer language. Zeros and ones, but arranged to create a readable name. When you give a file a name the computer writes that name in computer language, but here someone deliberately coded a few files so that their names appear as ‘read error’ warnings. That way they get hidden among the errors from the damage.”

“Devious,” Rudy agreed. “How many hidden files are there and what is in them?”

“There are ten files in two separate subfolders. One was marked BOS/SC, and I don’t think I have to go too far out on a limb to presume what that stands for.”

“You lost me again,” said Rudy.

“It was part of the verbal intel Ledger got from Rasouli,” explained Bug. “Rasouli made oblique references to two books, the Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex. BOS/SC. Anyway, when I cracked the files I expected to find complete texts or abstracts, but instead I got nine scanned images saved as pdfs. Very low-res and muddy. The other file is weird. All I could find was a Word doc with two words written in English. ‘Fuzzy math.’ That’s it. I’m running some additional cleanup and deep extraction programs to see if there are other hidden layers, but so far, bubkes.”

“Fuzzy math?” asked Rudy.

Circe grunted. “The Codex is supposed to be questionable commentary on an exact science, right? That says ‘fuzzy math’ to me. Could be some code hidden there. You get anything from the Codex, Bug?”

“Not so far. We don’t actually have a copy of the Codex, so I can’t check to see if there’s anything buried in the text.”

“Damn. Who has one?”

Bug made a face. “There is exactly one copy and it’s in the National Museum in Tehran.”

“Crap,” said Circe. “Any full or partial scans online?”

“Not that I’ve found, but searching all foreign-language databases will take a little longer.”

“What about the other one?” asked Rudy. “The Book of Shadows. Surely I’ve heard of that somewhere…”

Circe nodded. “It’s the book of spells used in Wicca.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” complained Rudy, flapping a hand. “Really? We’ve done zombies, clones, and mutants, now the DMS is squaring off against black magic?”

“Don’t laugh,” said Circe with surprising heat. “And stop being so Catholic for a minute. Wicca isn’t devil worship or black magic. That was all medieval propaganda created to suppress the rise of education among women. And even the concept of ‘black’ magic is completely unconnected to the modern Wicca, which is earthcentric and practiced according to positive energy and harmony with nature.”

Rudy held up his hands, palms out. “Mea culpa.”

Circe gave him a harrumph. “The modern practice is built mostly on a set of traditions created by Gerald Gardner, who first introduced the Book of Shadows to the initiates of his landmark Bricket Wood coven in the 1950s. It eventually became the central text for most of the other branches of the faith, including Alexandrianism and Mohsianism. But… I do have to admit that I don’t see how it could possibly relate at all to nuclear bombs.”

“I don’t think it does,” said Bug, “and the Gardner book probably isn’t the Book of Shadows involved in this case. Rasouli didn’t say anything to Joe about witches. Here, let me put the pdfs up and you tell me if this is Wiccan stuff or not.” He loaded an Adobe program and then opened the nine pdf files, throwing them onto nine smaller screens. Each file was a low-resolution scan of a single page from what looked like an ancient manuscript. Rudy bent forward and frowned at it. There were green and brown paintings of exotic plants that he did not recognize and line after line of writing in a language Rudy could not identify. Two of the pages were only text, and one was a complex diagram of the sun, with a face in the center and writing running in circles around the drawing.

“What language is that?” Rudy asked.

“I don’t know,” said Bug. “I just found these, and I wanted to show you before I started the recognition software. And the images are very low-res, so some of it might be hard to-”

Circe gasped. “My God!”

Rudy and Bug stared at her.

“I know what that is,” she said.

Barrier Safe House

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 10:39 a.m.

The good news was that between the CIA, the DMS, and a few other alphabet agencies, we had safe houses and equipment drops all over Tehran. One agency spook I knew told me that he could hardly walk down the street without seeing someone from the “family.”

“Invisible network my ass,” he added.

So, I went to the closest haven. When Echo Team had first arrived in Tehran we spent half a day at a safe house run by Barrier. It was staffed by two agents, a father and son. The father, Fariel, looked old enough to have been a school chum of Xerxes. His son, Cyrus, was a schoolteacher and probably the most boring person I’ve ever met. The kind of guy who speaks in a nasal monotone and can only talk about what he saw on TV.

Right now, though? I could use normal and boring. That house also had plenty of weapons and equipment. Rearming would go a long way toward chasing off the shakes. If I’d had a good fighting knife this morning then the encounter in my hotel room would have been a whole lot shorter and more satisfying.