Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

Obvious, but a lie.

The truth was something that she could never put into a field report. She would not know how to phrase it anyway. A gut instinct. A feeling. In her personal lexicon she called it a “flash.”

They did not happen often and sometimes she never understood what they meant. However, there were too many times in her life when a flash-a moment in which her entire mind and heart were locked onto a single person-proved to be a turning point. Sometimes those flashes saved her life.

Sometimes they forged an instant and inexplicable connection between her and the person who she was destined to kill.

She stayed there, seated on a folding chair, her sniper rifle resting on a bipod which in turn rested on a stack of small, sturdy crates. Not watching Rasouli.

She watched the American. The man who had identified himself as Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger.

She liked the name.

And she liked the man, which surprised her.

Not for the obvious reasons, and even she was aware of that much. To be sure, Ledger was tall and fit, handsome in the rugged way athletes often are. Some rough edges, a few visible scars, a lean waist, and muscular shoulders. That wasn’t it, though.

It was his eyes.

Her sniper scope was of the finest quality. Very precise and powerful. Through it she had looked into the man’s eyes while he joked with her on the phone. She knew that he’d been afraid. Who wouldn’t be with laser sights on him? But he wasn’t afraid in the right way. His was a practical fear, of the kind that only warriors have.

Warrior. She tasted the word. It was grandiose and yet it seemed to fit him quite well. More than that, though, was the hurt she saw in his eyes. Not hurt from anything related to this incident. Deeper hurt, older. That was something this woman understood more intimately than anything else. Her world was built on pillars of pain and suffering.

Was it possible that this man’s soul dwelt in a similar tower? Was that why she felt the flash at the moment when she and her team had first trained their laser sights on him?

If so, then it would genuinely hurt her to have to kill him.

Starbox Coffee

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 8:03 a.m.

I stared at Rasouli. “Saving the world from-what?”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Consider this. If scientists discovered than an asteroid was hurtling toward the earth and was likely to strike in one year, would it not be possible that the best and the brightest from all countries would drop their hostilities and work together to prevent a shared disaster?”

The comment was so weird that it jerked my head into an entirely different place. At the same time my heart started doing another jazz riff. “Christ! Is that what this is about?”

“What? Oh, no… no,” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “I speak hypothetically about the nature of our response to a shared threat too large for any one country to handle alone.”

“Next time say so. You almost gave me a frigging heart attack.”

He smiled at that. Jackass.

“Okay,” I said, “Given the right kind of potential catastrophe, then that kind of cooperation is possible. Even so, red tape would be a bitch.”

“And yet the red tape could be cut if the threat was more imminent, yes? Say that this hypothetical asteroid was due to strike in a month? The need for immediate and uninhibited action would necessitate a quicker exchange of information so that the situation could be handled. After all, global extermination trumps individual ideologies.”

“In a rational world, yes,” I agreed. “Where are you going with this?”

“There is a matter that will require very great and very careful cooperation.”

He removed a cell phone from his jacket pocket and played with the touch screen to bring up a photo, then handed the phone to me. “Do you know what that is?”

I stared at the picture and my mouth went as dry as dust.

“ Good God…”

“Indeed,” agreed Rasouli.

I knew all about them, of course. I had to. I knew the history, studied them for my job, read the field reports. I had seen them in museums and textbooks and on the Discovery Channel. Knowledge may be power but at that moment I felt as weak as a child. Even as a picture on a phone-small and frozen in a snapshot moment of time-it was terrifying to behold.

A nuclear bomb.

“It is a Teller-Ulam design hydrogen bomb,” said Rasouli quietly. “It has a yield of fifty megatons, which is equivalent to fourteen hundred times the combined power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or, if you look at it another way, it has ten times the combined power of all the explosives used in WWII.”

“Where is it?” I snarled, causing Rasouli to recoil from me.

“Please,” he said soothingly, “this device is not on U.S. soil.”

“Then why the hell are you showing me this?”

“Because I need you to know that this is something larger than the political struggles between our countries.”

“Your country has been trying to build this for years, asshole-” I began, but he cut me off, and again had to wave back his guard.

“You don’t understand,” said Rasouli in an urgent whisper, “this is not ours.”

I stared at him. “Then whose is it?”

“I… do not know,” he said. “That is one of the reasons I wanted your help. It’s likely the device is one of many that have gone ‘missing’ since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Russian economy.”

“Just so we’re clear,” I said, “you-Iran-you’re afraid of terrorists with a bomb?”

“Yes.” His mouth was a tight line, “and I’ll thank you not to smirk. This is a very real threat that could cause untold damage.”

“You have any suspects?”

Rasouli shrugged. “We are not a popular country, Captain Ledger. It is the price of being powerful, as you Americans well know,”

“Yeah. Seems like every five minutes there’s a fundamentalist nut job coming at us with a vest of C-4 and the name of God on his lips. Ain’t that a bitch?”

All that earned me was a contemptuous sneer. “This is hardly on the level of car bombings, Captain. Whoever is behind this is organized, extraordinarily well-financed, and subtle. I have reliable sources within Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Taliban and I am convinced they are not involved.”

“They aren’t the only players.”

“No, but they are the ones most likely to consider such a radical plan; and the smaller cells and splinter groups could never make one of these.”

“They could buy one,” I said.

“Of course, but it would be very expensive. Prohibitively so. Most organizations do not have that much money.”

“Hugo Vox could buy one of those with his beer money.”

“Why would he? His day is over.”

“Why? Because the Seven Kings are off the board?”

“No,” said Rasouli. “My sources tell me that Vox is ill.”

“What do you mean?”

Rasouli’s green eyes glittered. “He has cancer, didn’t you know?”

“Shit.”

It was good and bad news at the same time. Good news because it was nice to think about Vox rotting away. Bad because that was a much easier exit strategy than he deserved.

“Could be his last blast,” I said, meaning it the way it sounded.

I thought about what I said but then dismissed it. Vox is many things, but he has never struck me as vindictive. Murderous, to be sure, and merciless, but not petty. To detonate a bomb in frustration for dying of cancer…? No, that would be cheap, no matter what the death toll.

I tried to build a case for it in my mind, but gave it up. It didn’t fit Vox’s pattern at all. For him, killing was only ever a pathway to profit. Even so, I’d want to run this past Mr. Church, Rudy Sanchez, and Circe O’Tree. They built the profile on him that was being used by every law enforcement agency in the world.