Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

“For all of us, Captain.”

We gave that a moment.

“You are going to need to get out of that location,” he said.

“I know.”

“Don’t go to another Barrier safe house. The Company has one close to you.”

“Soon as we’re done I’m out of here,” I assured him.

“The woman,” Church said, shifting back to my report. “Violin. Give me a read on her.”

“Hard to say exactly. She’s a voice on the phone and she’s probably lying to me.”

“Then give me guesswork and suppositions.”

I thought about it. “She sounds young. Late twenties. Her base accent is Italian, though she could be any nationality or race with an accent picked up by familiarity. She’s a trained sniper. She’s for hire. The people who hired her are connected to Vox, which is how Rasouli hired her. No idea whose side she’s on, though she doesn’t seem to like Rasouli. And she’s tied up with someone or something called Arklight.”

“Arklight,” he said, repeating the name slowly, seeming to appreciate it. “Interesting.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Yes. Did she confirm that she was part of Arklight?”

“No, when I asked her about it she hung up on me. Why? What’s Arklight?”

He didn’t answer.

“Yo! How about a little help for the guy standing in a room full of dead people?”

“Captain,” said Church, “to tell you anything useful about Arklight would mean betraying a confidence.”

“I don’t care.”

“It could also put you in danger.” He paused. “And, yes, I know how absurd that sounds, given the circumstances.”

“You think?”

“I need to make a call about this. In the short term, I have had dealings with Arklight in the past. Most of the time those dealings were harmonious. Working together against a shared threat, that sort of thing. But they are not allies. There are no standing nonaggression agreements between us.”

“Can you try to vague that up a bit more? I almost understood it.”

He changed the subject. “The man who attacked you at the hotel, you said that he was winning the fight? Assess that. Are we talking about superior combat skill or something else?”

“We were pretty well matched for skill and technique. It’d be hard to put a label on his fighting style, but he wasn’t trying anything on me that he hadn’t done a lot of times before. Everything was very smooth, very efficient.”

Church grunted his understanding. At a certain level, when you’re fighting to kill rather than trying to win a belt or a tournament, all style is stripped away in favor of a selection of techniques that are the most practical and effective at the moment. Experts who engage in these kinds of fights usually rely on a small percentage of the skills they’ve learned; skills that they know they can use, and which they can use without thinking about it. At that level a kick is a kick is a kick; a punch is a punch.

“What about enhancements?” Church asked.

“I don’t know. Nothing obvious, no exoskeletons or combat suit with joint servos. Nothing like that. He was faster and stronger, but the weird thing is that he didn’t have the bulk for it. This was way beyond the limits of ‘wiry strength.’”

“In the absence of the sniper, would he have won the fight?”

“Coin toss,” I admitted. “We were hurting each other, so I guess it would have come down to who wanted it more. I tend to want it quite a lot.”

“Fair enough.”

“On the other hand, let’s not rule out enhancement. Something chemical, maybe.”

“I wonder what Dr. Hu would find in a blood test. I don’t suppose you collected any-?”

“I didn’t take a cheek swab or get him to pee in a cup for me, but I have plenty of his blood on my clothes.”

“I’ll arrange a pickup.” He paused. “The attacker… gauge his strength. Use Bunny as a yardstick.”

“Twice as strong. Easily,” I said. “I know that sounds ridiculous, but that knight was a bull and-”

“Wait,” Church cut in sharply. “You just called the attacker a ‘knight.’ What did you mean by that? You didn’t mention that earlier.”

“Oh,” I said, and realized that he was right. When I’d blown through the story the first time I had called the attacker “the goon.” So I backed up and explained what Violin had told me.

There was a long silence on the phone.

“Describe the symbol Cyrus Omidi drew on the floor.”

“I can show it to you. The knight had it tattooed on his arm. I took a picture.” I fiddled with the phone and sent the e-mail.

I heard Church hitting keys to open the e-mail.

When he spoke again his voice was tight and urgent. “Captain, listen to me very carefully. Get out of that house right now.”

“Why-what’s wrong?”

“Violin was correct. That was a Red Knight you faced in your hotel and another one who killed the Omidis. That means Arklight is involved. Get out of that house immediately and call me from the CIA safe house.”

“Why-”

“ Go! ”

The Hangar

Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn

June 15, 2:25 a.m. EST

Mr. Church set the phone down and stared at it. His hands were balled into fists on top of his desk blotter.

Then he snatched the phone up again and punched a speed dial.

“Yo,” said Aunt Sallie after two rings.

“Auntie, the situation in Iran has just gotten significantly worse.”

“We’re hunting nukes, Deke, how much fucking worse can it-?”

“Captain Ledger is being hunted by Red Knights.”

There was a stunned silence on the phone, and then Aunt Sallie whispered, “Oh my God!”

The Warehouse

Baltimore, Maryland

June 15, 2:26 a.m. EST

“Wait,” said Bug, “what?”

“Those pages,” said Circe. “I recognize them. They’re from an ancient codex called the Voynich manuscript. I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bug dubiously. “Rasouli seemed to think this was the Book of Shadows.”

Circe shook her head. “You’re wrong, Bug. That’s the Voynich manuscript.”

“What is the Voynich manuscript?” asked Rudy. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s an old ciphertext,” Circe said as she accessed a browser and went to one of the university research sites she subscribed to. In a few seconds a screen came up with THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT MYSTERY in bold letters. She went through the directory and pulled up several scans of individual pages. The pages were crammed with writing in a language none of them knew.

Bug whistled.

“Well I’ll be damned,” murmured Rudy.

Circe pulled up more pages, and some of these had pictures. Plants, naked women, celestial diagrams. The drawings were primitive, but they were orderly-even if the sense of order was elusive. Then she found one that matched a page from Rasouli’s files.

“See? I was right,” Circe said triumphantly. In a few minutes she matched seven of the nine pages, but then she frowned as she ran through every single page of the manuscript. “Wait… did I miss them?”

“No,” said Bug. “The last two pages from Rasouli’s file aren’t in the Voynich thingee.”

“Slow down,” begged Rudy. “What is this?”

Circe took a breath. “The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book that dates back to the fifteenth century. Radio carbon dating put it somewhere between 1404 to 1438 C.E., and from the materials used it’s believed that it was created in northern Italy, which was a very important and wealthy part of Europe at the time.”

“Who wrote this book?” asked Rudy.

“That’s just it,” said Circe, “no one knows who wrote it or why. It’s named after Wilfrid Voynich, a rare-book dealer from New York who discovered the book in 1912 during a buying trip to Villa Mondragone, near Rome. It was in a trunkful of rare texts. Voynich spent the rest of his life trying to decipher the language, but he never did. In fact no one ever has.”