Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

Those were questions I never wanted to get the answers to.

Fear crawled like ants under my skin. My hands were shaking so badly that I dropped the papers, which landed heavily on the corner with the chunky binder clip. It made an odd sound as it landed. Not the hollow metal sound you’d expect from a clip; this was a dull thud.

I snatched it up and peered at it. The clip was heavier than it needed to be to bind papers. I hadn’t paid enough attention to that at first; now I did. I opened the spring-metal jaws and studied the inside. There was a tiny bead of plastic inside, painted the same color as the clip’s body. I grabbed my scanner and ran it over the clip and the electronics detector pinged.

The little bead was a bug of some kind. But what kind?

Then I understood. It wasn’t a listening device or another booby trap. It was a backup in case the papers in the briefcase were stolen.

It was a tracking device.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

Two seconds later an explosion rocked the entire house.

Mustapha’s Daily Goods

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 7:38 p.m.

The blast came from the back of the building and sounded like an entry charge. Someone-almost certainly the Sabbatarians-had blasted through the rear door.

Ghost leapt out of a dream and onto his feet. He gave a single startled bark and crouched by the closed door, eyes narrowed, ears straight up, fur bristling along his spine. I tore the Beretta out of my shoulder rig and whipped open the door.

Smoke billowed up the stairwell, and I heard Jamsheed yelling in protest for two seconds before his words were cut off by a meaty thud. No way to tell if he was dead or if they’d clubbed him down.

“Upstairs!” someone yelled in French. I heard someone reply with a German accent.

Definitely the Sabbatarians. Pricks.

My rage howled inside of me. The list of names burned in my mind, and I wanted to hurt these pricks. I wanted to hurt them so bad it was an actual physical ache in my chest.

But I did it smart. I backtracked to the bedroom and grabbed the grenades, shoved most of them into my pockets; but I pulled the pins on a couple of flash-bangs and dropped them down the stairwell. Then I wrapped one arm around Ghost’s head and the other around my own and huddled down.

The blasts were massive in the small house, and harsh white light etched the slats on the stair rails and the edges of the framed photographs on all the walls.

Before the echo had a chance to fade I was up and running; Ghost was right with me. There were six of them with automatic weapons, two with hammers and stakes. Jamsheed lay on the floor; he had a vicious bruise above his right eyebrow and blood was pooled around his head. Several of the Sabbatarians were kneeling or bent over in pain; most of them were screaming.

“Hit! Hit! Hit!” I bellowed, and Ghost shook off his pain and weariness and became a white missile of furious bloodlust. He took the closest figure hard, teeth tearing into the man’s inner thigh, high near his crotch. There was a sudden blast of red blood as Ghost’s fangs slashed open the man’s femoral artery.

I opened up with the Beretta, using double taps on everyone I saw, one to the chest to stall them, one to the head to blast them out of my life. My inner Warrior was screaming at me to kill them all.

One of the men turned toward me and even though he was dazed from the flash-bang, he opened up with an AK-47, the rounds chopping into the stairwell inches behind me. I closed to zero distance and put two into his face. As he fell his finger clutched around the trigger and hot rounds stitched a line up the wall and across the ceiling.

Ghost barked a warning and I turned in time to dodge away from a man raising a pistol with both hands. He shot where I had been and I shot where he was. The man staggered out of sight.

Behind me someone screamed in terrible pain as Ghost went for his throat. The scream ended with a wet gurgle.

There were five men down already and three on their feet. The flash-bangs had done their jobs in the confined space of the entry hall. These men were disoriented and, even though they were armed, they had no aim. I killed two of them before the slide locked back on my Beretta. The last guy didn’t have a pistol, and he thought I was helpless with an empty gun, so he rushed me with the stake. I used the pistol to bash the stake aside and then I snapped his leg with a side-thrust kick. He screamed and twisted down to the floor, and I rechambered the kick and slammed my heel against his ear, flinging him onto his side.

I swapped out the magazine as I spun around. Everybody was down. Ghost stood over the second man he’d killed, and his muzzle was black with blood.

The back door was a charred ruin, hanging in splinters from a single twisted hinge, and I could see a black sedan parked outside. Around me were the dead and dying. My rage was still boiling, but my inner Cop voice was telling me to dial it down, to find someone with a pulse. To get some answers.

And then a figure stepped into the doorway.

Tall, lithe, dressed in a black chador. I pointed my gun at her. Ghost growled from deep in his chest.

She said, “Joseph-they’re coming!”

Instantly a hail of bullets tore into the doorframe as Violin dove into the room.

Mustapha’s Daily Goods

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 7:42 p.m.

The bullets filled the air as Violin hit the floor, rolled over a dead man, grabbed him, and pulled him into a sitting position to serve as a shield.

Ghost looked to me for a command. To him she was another potential enemy, a danger to the pack. With a word I could order him to tear her apart or accept her into the pack.

“Home!” I snapped. It was the word that would change everything about how he would react to her. “Home” was code for “friend.” Instantly Ghost’s gaze shifted away from her and refocused on the barrage that continued to tear apart the doorway. He hunkered down behind the man whose throat he had torn out, bristling, muscles trembling as he waited for the command and the opportunity to fight.

Violin turned to me and tore away the chador that hid her face and body.

I don’t know what I expected to see. Certainly not the “monster” she considered herself to be. She was beautiful, but not in the way that Circe is. Not curvy and elegant; she had none of the fineness of features that belonged on the covers of fashion magazines. Her features were sharper, more foxlike than feline, with intelligent eyes, sharply defined cheekbones, thin lips that were curled into a wicked combat smile, and a body like a dancer’s. Small breasts, long limbs, superb tone. She wore black formfitting clothes with lots of pockets and cross belts for weapons. On a strap slung across her body was a compact Micro Tavor-21 Israeli bullpup assault rifle with an extended thirty-two-round magazine. Very sexy. She reminded me of Grace. Not in looks, but in her air of competence and lethal potential. It took a single microsecond to take all of this in.

“How many?” I yelled.

“Too many,” she said. “Two full teams. Twenty at least.”

“Christ.”

“Maybe more in front.”

We looked at each other in the way soldiers will on a battlefield, gauging each other’s competence and skills. It was a lightning-fast conversation that would have been slowed down by words. She nodded to me and I nodded back.

The hail of bullets slowed and I heard men yelling orders. They were coming.

“Call it,” I said.

“Front,” said Violin.

“Back,” I agreed.

She spun around and ran in a fast crouch toward the store; I pulled a grenade out of my pocket. Not a flash-bang this time. As shadows filled the destroyed doorway I pulled the pin and threw it.