Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

“Maybe, but in their own way, both sides of the Agreement have tended more toward moderation than extremist acts.”

“You view blowing up mosques and murdering nuns to be indicative of balance?”

“Yes,” she said. “No other view makes much sense, not when you consider how long this has been going on.”

“Interesting,” he said thoughtfully, then changed the subject. “We are trying to make sense of Rasouli’s mention of the Book of Shadows. My people are trying to decode the fragments of the book included on the drive.”

“Good luck. We’ve been trying to decode that damned thing for-” She suddenly stopped and there was a heavy silence at the other end.

“Lilith?” prodded Church. “How exactly have you been trying to decode the pages? Is there something you would like to tell me? Did you provide those pages to Rasouli? Is that what you started to say?”

“God, no. But…” Lilith cleared her throat. “We, um… we actually have a complete copy of the Book of Shadows. We’ve had it for some time.”

“Have you?” Church said mildly. “And were you planning on telling me about it before or after the nukes detonated?”

Lilith said nothing.

“How long have you had the Book?”

“Well… give or take… seven years.”

Church sighed. “This kind of obfuscation is exactly why counterterrorism is a bureaucratic nightmare.”

“Wait a damn minute,” snapped Lilith. “You speak as if you had a right to it. Some of our people died to obtain this copy.”

“So lay some flowers on their grave and move on from the dramatics,” he fired back. “I’ve made my resources available to the Mothers and to Arklight on a number of occasions.”

“Sure, but you never let us have access to MindReader. You keep that to yourself.”

“Hardly the same thing.”

“Well, it’s water under the bridge, isn’t it?” she fired back. “We have a copy of the Book of Shadows, and if you stop being such a prick I’ll consider e-mailing you a high-res scan.”

“Have you translated any of it?”

“No.”

“In seven years?”

“Perhaps we may have accomplished something if we had MindReader.”

“Point taken. Send me the e-mail now and I will make sure that it is fed through MindReader. I further promise that I will share the results of that scan. All of it, unreservedly.”

After a moment she said, “Thank you.” And hung up. Forcefully.

Over Kuwaiti Airspace

June 15, 10:28 a.m. EST

Church pressed the intercom.

“Bug, I’m sending through a file. It’s a complete scan of the Book of Shadows. The book is four hundred and thirty one pages of densely written and coded text. Run it through MindReader. Pattern recognition, decryption, the deciphering software, all of it. If you get anything, no matter how small it seems, contact me at once.”

“You got it.”

“Also, tell Circe and Dr. Sanchez that we have this. Let them have full access. Circe may want to compare it to the Voynich manuscript.”

“Sure.”

Mustapha’s Daily Goods

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 6:54 p.m.

I went downstairs and out through the back to meet Abdul Jamar. Twilight brought the cool breezes and birdsong that are the rewards for anyone who survives the blistering heat of the day. I stayed in the shadows as a three-year-old Runna X12 pulled to the curb. I noted that the dome light was rigged not to come on as he opened the door.

Abdul was dumpy little man with face like a tired accountant and glasses with thick lenses. You’d never pick him out as a dissident operative working with the CIA to overthrow Ahmadinejad, which I suppose was the point.

He looked me up and down with apparent disinterest. “Cold for this time of year,” he said.

“More like January,” I agreed.

He sighed as if the simple exchange of code words was a burden and a pain in the ass. He glanced at Ghost, who was poking his head out past my thigh.

“Friendly dog?” Abdul asked, beginning to reach out for a quick pet.

“Not today,” I said. Abdul whipped his hand back. He opened the trunk of his car and produced a zippered laptop case and a blue gym bag.

“For you,” he said to me, keeping an eye on Ghost.

I took the items and handed him a plain white envelope that I had borrowed from Jamsheed. It was sealed and folded several times around the flash drive.

“For the pouch?” Abdul asked.

“Yes. I’m not joking when I say that you need to protect that with your life.”

Abdul managed to look deeply unimpressed. Without another word he got back into his car and drove away. Charming guy.

I checked that the alley was empty and went back inside. Jamsheed was in his store, so I took my gear to the bedroom and locked the door. The briefcase and valise I’d taken from the vampire hunters were on the bed. I told Ghost to guard the door and he did so by flopping down in front of it and falling asleep.

The laptop was a DMS tactical field computer. Ultrasophisticated, hardened against EMPs, rigged with 128-bit code scramblers, with a powerful satellite uplink. I turned it on and punched in the proper passwords.

The other bag included party favors. A Beretta 9mm with a Trinity sound suppressor and four extra magazines loaded with subsonic hollow points. A nylon shoulder rig was included with a fast-draw holster, and it had slots for two of the mags. A Rapid Response Folder, which is a nifty tactical knife that clipped on to my right pants pocket and hung out of sight. A snap of the wrist flicks out a 3.375-inch blade which, though short, allowed a fighter to cut and slash at full speed with no drag at all on the arm. There were four flash-bangs and four fragmentation grenades. And a Smith amp; Wesson Airweight Centennial, a hammerless. 38 revolver in an ankle holster. As I unpacked it I could feel my body happily pumping out testosterone. If I ran into another Red Knight, it was going to be a substantially different encounter, no matter what Church or Violin thought about my chances. I felt like saying “Fuckin’ A” or “Bring the pain,” but I knew Ghost disapproved of that kind of rah-rah crap.

I strapped on the Airweight and clipped the RRF in place, then shrugged into the shoulder rig.

The computer case had a few extra goodies, including a new set of earbuds with a pocket-sized uplink booster. The receiver looked like a mole and affixed to the inside of my ear. The mike was a pale freckle on my upper lip. The technology is a couple of giant steps ahead of what’s in all of the holiday catalogs for the covert-ops community. Mr. Church has a friend in the industry, and he always has the coolest stuff.

There was also a smaller zippered case containing a complete toolkit useful for everything from rewiring a toaster to, for example, de-arming a booby-trapped briefcase.

Back when I was a cop, we had specialists to come in and do this sort of thing. They were very brave men and women who had jobs I never envied. In the Rangers I had some basic bomb-handling courses, but it wasn’t until I began working for the DMS that I learned how to do this sort of thing for real.

It did occur to me-now, I mean-that it would have been more practical to have searched the cars and then asked Krystos for the combination before I shot him. Can’t unring a bell, though.

I took the toolkit and the briefcase into the bathroom and closed the door.

I removed a tiny electronics detector and ran it over the case. As expected, the locks were wired. The question now was whether they had a simple intrusion trigger or a dead-man’s fail-safe. I ran the scanner over every inch of the case and matched the readings against the unit’s stored records of over three thousand trigger variations. The reading was not one hundred percent, but it was weighted heavily toward the locks being simple antitheft. They’d blow if the wrong combination was entered too many times on the coded touch pad, or if the locks were tampered with.