Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

Shit.

Mihai rolled off of me and decided on a new plan. He crouched and sprang at me, holding the stake in both hands and plunging it downward with all his strength. There was nowhere I could go, no way I could avoid that deadly attack.

But Nadja chose that exact second to try to shoot me in the face. The timing was absolutely perfect. For me. Totally sucked for Mihai. I think he realized it, but by then he was already in the air and there was nothing he could do about it. Nadja’s first bullet blew his jaw off, splashing my face and throat with hot blood.

Nadja screamed in panic, and, as many people inexperienced with guns often do, she kept pulling the trigger. Bullet after bullet chopped into Mihai and dug holes in the floor right next to my head. The impact warped the arc of Mihai’s lunge, and he twisted as he went down, his shoulders and ruined face hitting the floor a foot from my cheek, his body flopping over so that he landed in a heap and did not move.

Nadja was still screaming when the slide locked back on the small automatic.

“Reload! Reload!” yelled Inigo between shrieks of pain.

I heard a car screech to a stop in back. More people.

Inigo shouted toward the sounds. “Krystos!”

Goddamn it.

Nadja fished in her clothes for a new magazine, dropped it, picked it up with trembling fingers. All the time she babbled to herself. “Oh merciful God… oh sweet savior…”

Inigo was crawling toward me, or so I thought. Then I saw that Mihai’s hammer and stake were right there. I squirmed and fought to get the dead weight off of me. Something hard jabbed me in the ribs and I realized that Irish Bob’s pistol was there, caught between us.

As Nadja slapped the magazine into the pistol I gave a great heave and tore the nine millimeter from the clamshell holster. It was a hammerless Glock 17.

Beautiful.

I couldn’t clear the body, though, so I buried the barrel against Irish Bob’s love handle and fired. The bullet met no appreciable resistance as it punched a hole through the dead man and caught Nadja in the stomach. It stopped her as surely as if she’d hit a wall, but there were footsteps in the kitchen. I fired twice more, hitting her in the sternum and then in the chin as she sagged to her knees.

Inigo actually stopped trying to stab me and stared with uncomprehending horror at Nadja.

With a growl I kicked my way out from under the bodies and put two rounds into him. Then I rolled onto my stomach as three figures rushed down the hall toward me. Two of them had guns in their hands, but they were pointing chest high, expecting a stand-up fight. From my prone position I emptied the rest of the magazine into them. The Glock carried seventeen rounds. I’d used three on Nadja and two on Inigo. That gave me twelve bullets to cut these cocksuckers down.

They all went down.

One of them-the guy in front-died right there.

The other two took multiple hits. Arms and legs. I was dazed and hurt and my aim was screwed up, so they lived through it.

That was not going to be a lucky break for them.

CIA Safe House #11

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 12:41 p.m.

I scrambled to my feet and rushed the men in the hall. They were in a groaning heap and covered with blood. One of them tried to bring up his pistol, but I threw my own empty weapon at him, catching him in the face. While he was screaming, I broke his wrist and took the pistol from him. That jacked his screams up another notch. I wasn’t in the mood for it, so I kicked him in the face until he stopped screaming, and then I dragged him by the hair into the living room.

The second survivor wasn’t screaming, but he was conscious. Barely. He tried to crawl away, but his attempt was feeble. Once I disarmed him, I grabbed his ankle and pulled him out and dropped him next to his friend.

I had no cuffs and no rope. On the living room table was a big leather valise of the kind doctors used to carry. I fished in it and found various tools, more hammers and stakes, and a roll of duct tape. Nice. A thousand and one household uses.

I used a lot of it on the wrists and ankles of my two prisoners.

One of them-the guy who hadn’t screamed-had a pretty bad wound high on his thigh. He tried to use his taped hands to staunch the blood flow, so I tore the headscarf off of the dead woman and made a compress of it, then bound it tightly with the tape. Not a great job, but good enough for now. He watched my eyes as I worked, and from his expression of despair I knew that he knew that this wasn’t an act of kindness.

Patting the men down produced wallets with local driver’s licenses. Even though I was never a cop in Iran I could tell that the IDs were phony. Even so, the name on the conscious guy’s license was Krystos Gallikos. The other survivor was Constantin Enescu. A Greek and a Romanian. Add in the Russian broad, the Spanish Inigo, Irish Bob, and whatever the hell Victor and Mihai were and we had a real League of Nations here.

“You speak English?” I asked Krystos.

He stared at me without apparent comprehension.

I simplified things. I put the barrel of his pistol against his forehead, then bent and whispered in his ear. “Don’t fucking move.”

He grasped the subtleties of my request and gave me an enthusiastic nod.

Constantin lay in a fetal ball, apparently unconscious.

Out in the hallway Ghost barked weakly. I shoved the gun into my waistband and hurried out to him. He was a mess, totally entangled in the flexible wire net. It took me a couple of minutes to extricate him, and his panicked flailing did not help. I soothed him and spoke quietly, but Ghost had been pushed past his limits. When he was free he crawled toward me and buried his head on my thighs. He let loose a stream of urine that pooled around him.

I bent and kissed his head and told him that he was a good, brave boy. He gave my face a few nervous licks and his body trembled as badly as if he were in an icebox.

In the enclosed hallway the mingled smells of urine, blood, and garlic made a strange, cloying miasma that was completely unpleasant. It felt like horror and defeat. I tried to coax Ghost to follow me, but he wouldn’t; so I left him where he was for now.

Back in the living room I squatted in front of Krystos. His face was running with greasy sweat.

“I’ll ask this again,” I said, and I was mildly alarmed at how reasonable and calm my voice sounded. Given all that had just happened, this was not necessarily a good thing. “Do you understand English?”

He gave a stubborn shake of his head that allowed me to decide if he was saying no or telling me to go piss off. Behind me I heard a groan and whirled around. It was frigging Inigo, still alive with two bullets in his chest cavity. Tough son of a bitch. He was crawling like a slug toward a pistol that lay on the floor a yard away. I went over and kicked the pistol under the couch.

Inigo turned his head and glared up at me with total hatred. I stepped over and straddled his body, staring down at him from my full height. I looked from him to Krystos and back again.

“Who tipped you off about this place?” I asked him.

“Fuck you!” Inigo growled and tried to spit at me.

“Wrong answer,” I said and shot him in the head.

I made sure I was looking into Krystos’s eyes when I did it. Sometimes you need to use visual aids to really make your point.

Krystos screamed and tried to crawl backward into the wallpaper. There is a difference between seeing death in combat and seeing an execution of someone you know. I lowered the pistol and walked back to Krystos and hunkered down in front of him.

“Okay,” I said into an ugly silence. “Let’s try this again. Do you understand English?”