Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

“Because your regular diplomatic channels are staffed by vultures, thieves, cutthroats, and scumbags,” I said. “And your own people would sell you out for the price of a bowl of lentil soup.”

“No,” he said, “my own people would sell me out, that is not a question, but it would be for very much money.”

“Ah. So you know that your ambassadors and diplomats are as crooked as a barrel of fish hooks.”

He smiled. “There is a saying: ‘Trust a thief before a diplomat.’”

“That says it.”

“There is a matter of great importance and equally great complexity that needs to be dealt with, but it is so…” Rasouli waved his hand as he searched for the word.

“Fragile?” I suggested. “Volatile?”

“Either will do. Both, I suppose.”

“And you thought it would be easier to discuss it by ambushing me with snipers?”

“Would you have agreed to this meeting without them?”

“Probably not.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Besides… the snipers were already here, preparing for another task. I… borrowed them.” He paused, then added, “That other task is now canceled and will likely be abandoned.”

“What was the other job?”

Rasouli considered, then shook his head. “No, it would confuse things to discuss that. What we are here to discuss is much more important.”

“Before we get to that-why me?”

He spread his hands. “You came highly recommended.”

“By whom?”

“A mutual friend.”

“Give me a name.”

A strange, fierce light flared in his eyes and he studied every inch of my face before he answered. “Hugo Vox.”

Rasouli couldn’t have hit me harder if he’d swung a baseball bat at my face.

“You’re shitting me.”

“Not at all.”

I swallowed a lump the size of a football. Hugo Vox. Now if there was ever an “enemy of god,” then Vox had my vote. Pretty much my vote for “actual supervillain” too. Vox used to be one of the most trusted men in the United States anti- and counterterrorism community, trusted by the kind of people who don’t trust anyone. Vox was a screener for above-top-secret personnel and the director of Terror Town, the most effective counterterrorism training facility in the world. To be “vetted by Vox” was the highest honor and a seal of absolute trust. Unfortunately he turned out to be a murdering psychopath and a founding member of the Seven Kings, a secret society that we believed to be behind everything from 9/11 to the London hospital bombing. A very conservative estimate of the deaths that could directly or indirectly be laid at his door was somewhere north of twelve thousand. I wanted his head on a pole, as did most of the law enforcement agencies in the world. My boss, Mr. Church, most of all.

“How do I know that you really spoke to Vox?” I said in a quiet growl.

Rasouli offered a thin smile. “He said that you might ask that, so he gave me something to say. I suppose it is a code phrase that will mean something to you. It means nothing to me.”

“What is it?”

“Vox told me to say, ‘I vetted Grace and she was clean. She wasn’t one of mine.’”

I had to work really hard to keep what I was feeling off my face. It cost a lot.

Grace.

Damn.

When I’d first joined the DMS a year ago, Church’s senior field officer and my direct superior was Major Grace Courtland. She was as beautiful as she was smart and tough. She had been the first woman to enter Britain’s elite SAS team as a field operative, and she helped build Barrier-Britain’s elite and highly secret counterterrorism rapid response force-and was later seconded to Church when Congress gave him approval to build the DMS. Grace and I went into combat together, we worked together, and we fell in love together. We never should have done that, it was against common sense and every rule in the book. Then, last summer, a professional killer’s bullet took Grace away from me. She died saving the world. The whole damn world. I still hear her voice; still catch glimpses of her out of the corner of my eye. Still feel the absolute yawning, cavernous absence of her in my heart.

She had also been vetted by Vox before coming to work for Church. Some people on both sides of the pond tried to use that to smear Grace’s good name. Church had words with a few of them. I had words with a few others. Word got around and people shut the hell up.

Hearing her name on the lips of this monster filled me with a rage so intense that black poppies seemed to bloom before my eyes. Rasouli watched my face and I could see the delight he took in what he saw. He was like a vampire, feeding off of my pain.

The voices in my head all screamed at me to drag Rasouli to the floor and…

… I closed my eyes for a moment.

Grace.

Thinking of her tricked me into a memory of her speaking my name.

Joe.

The black flowers of hate withered and blew away, leaving a strange, cold control. I smiled at Rasouli and after a moment his smile faded.

“Vox,” I said quietly.

“He spoke quite highly of you. I think he likes you… and he certainly admires you. He called you ‘tenacious.’”

I leaned toward him. “Hear me on this. If you are working with Vox to bring any harm to the United States or its people, I will make it my life’s work to tear your world apart. I’m not talking about government sanctions, and I’m not even talking about a black ops hit. You’ll go to sleep one night and when you wake up it’ll be you and me someplace where you can scream all you want, because believe me you will want to scream.” He started to smile at the brash phrasing, but I leaned an inch closer. “If you’re here then you know who I am, and what I’ve done. You know that most of the wiring inside my head is already fucked. It wouldn’t take much to push me all the way over the line. Look at me. Look into my eyes, tell me if I’m lying.”

His mouth tightened into a hard line as he cut a glance at his bodyguard, who was cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick, and back to me.

He said, “You are correct, Captain Ledger. I do know who-and what — you are. And it is for that reason that I risked so much to meet you.”

“And Vox?”

Rasouli’s lip curled as if he suddenly smelled dog shit on his shoe. “He is an insect to be stepped on. If you are asking if he and I are conspiring together, then no. I would sooner let a desert camel have its way with me.”

“And yet you can call him up for favors any time you want?”

He thought about that, shrugged, took a pen and notebook from his pocket, wrote a string of numbers, tore off the page, and handed it to me. “All I have ever had for him is a phone number. It’s a cell number that we have never been able to trace.”

I looked at the number. “What are the chances that Vox will answer this call?”

“I do not know and do not care,” he said. “Vox is your concern. If you can use that number to find him, then do so with my blessings.”

“Is this the party line?”

Rasouli shook his head. “No. Vox has friends among the ayatollahs, but you probably know that.”

“Is he in Iran?”

“I have no idea.”

We sat for a moment with that floating in the air between us. Then I slipped the page into my shirt pocket. “God help you if you’re lying to me.”

Rasouli frowned, but it wasn’t a fear reaction. It looked as if he was considering another aspect of what I’d said. Perhaps it was the reference to “God.” Whatever it was, he nodded.

“There are times, Captain, that people who share as many ideological and political differences as do we can share a compatible view of something else. In prisons, for example, even the most hardened murderers cannot abide a molester of children.”