Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

I put the barrel of the gun in his ear. “Nice try. Clean it with alcohol or wrap it dirty.”

He threw me ugly looks and aimed uglier looks at Ghost, who managed not to wilt and die under the lethal glare. The major opened the first aid kit and started angrily tearing open packaged alcohol swabs.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“No one,” I said. “I’m not even here.”

“You are not Russian,” he said, and then tried to prove it by rattling off a quick insult in that language. Something about my mother and a goat. In the same tongue I told him that his father dallied with little boys and ate pork during Ramadan. That shut him up and probably raised his blood pressure by too many points. He cut another look at the wall with the fire ax.

“Those are bad thoughts you’re having, friend,” I said.

He continued cleaning his wounds, though his eyes flicked to the wall over and over again.

My earbud buzzed and, through a burst of bad static, Khalid said he was two floors up. I touched the bud and, still in Russian, said to wait until further orders. Khalid doesn’t speak a word of Russian, but it didn’t matter. He was sharp enough not to spoil whatever play I was making. The major, however, looked somewhat mollified, if still alarmed and confused. And he kept shooting frightened looks at Ghost, who in turn occasionally licked at the blood on his muzzle. A nice effect.

When the major was done wrapping his arm, I took him into the adjoining bathroom and used his own metal handcuffs to chain him to the toilet pipes. Then I had Lydia stand guard as I dragged the other cops in and similarly secured them. It was a tight fit in the tiny bathroom cubicle. The place stank of old urine and fresh blood. The guards started coming around, but they were sick and dazed and hurt; they had no real fight left in them.

“If nothing goes boom,” I said to them, “someone will be along to let you out. Hopefully that will be today. If you start yelling or try to escape, I will come back here and kill you. Tell me you understand.”

The major answered for all of them. A short guttural grunt. Good enough.

I closed and locked the door and barricaded it with a desk.

“Come on,” I said to Ghost, and went back out into the hall.

“Gaucho,” Lydia said quietly, “I’ve been trying to raise the rest of the team but all I’m hearing is my own voice.”

I tried my earbud. Nothing.

“Worry about it later,” I said. “We still have a nuke to find before it blows us all into orbit.”

She faked a coquettish grin. “Aww, you sure know how to sweet-talk a girl.”

The clock inside my head said tick-tock.

Aghajari Oil Refinery

Iran

June 16, 5:52 a.m.

But the hall wasn’t telling us anything. It was a short run to a blank wall made from gray bricks. I pulled up the floor plans for this level and studied them. The original designs called for a corridor leading ten yards straight ahead and then a big square room forty yards per side. The plans had been to use the room for bulk storage and to build a heavy-duty elevator down from the loading bay. Technically this is where Abdul’s machine parts should have been taken to be uncrated and then switched to other elevators to bring them where the parts were needed. But the chamber had been x-ed off of the blueprints in favor of a more practical ground-level storehouse that would allow parts to be rolled in from trucks by forklift. Less expensive and cumbersome than a subterranean storeroom.

Lydia pounded a fist on the wall and shook her head. “This doesn’t make sense, Gaucho. I mean… it had to be expensive as hell-and time consuming-to cut a corridor this far into the rock just to put in a few extra storerooms and a security substation. And it would have cost even more to run plumbing, electricity, computer and phone lines, and everything else all the way the down here. Who does that without a reason?”

“No one does that,” I agreed.

And yet there was no door hidden in the wall.

“Shall we go ask the major again?” she asked.

“It’s that or go out for a beer.”

Ghost wagged his tail. Booze hound. But as we approached the door, Ghost immediately started growling. The fur on his back stood up like the bristles on a wire brush, and he barked sharply at the closed bathroom door.

“ Cuidado,” snapped Lydia, bringing the rifle up.

I pulled open the door and we went in fast. The room was as we left it. Ghost ran straight to the desk that blocked the bathroom and his growls deepened. Something was pulling the wolf out from under the dog’s facade.

“Cover me,” I said as I grabbed the desk and hauled it out of the way. Lydia and Ghost moved to one side. I drew my gun and yanked the bathroom door open.

The soldiers we’d roughed up were where we had left them, except that they were dead. Their throats had been torn away and they lay in a lake of blood. The metal cuffs I’d used to secure the major were twisted out of shape as if someone had put them in a vise and applied a hell of a lot of leverage. Or an unnatural amount of physical strength.

And the major was gone.

Ghost snarled. Not at the dead men, but at the rear wall of the small cubicle. There were bloody handprints on the wood behind the toilet, and the back wall-actually my missing hidden door-stood ajar. I quieted Ghost with a gesture as I bent close to the opening. There was no sound, but a harsh, foul-smelling odor wafted out on a sluggish current of air. It wasn’t the stink of petroleum or the sewage smell of methane, and it wasn’t the garlic I’d swallowed. This was a stench that provoked the most primitive reactions in me so that in my head the Civilized Man cringed back, the Cop became aware and defensive, and the Warrior bared his teeth in fearful, vicious defiance.

It was the sick-sweet aroma of rotting meat.

The perfume of death.

Near Aghajari Oil Refinery

June 16, 5:54 a.m.

Violin tapped her earpiece. “Oracle.”

“Oracle welcomes you, Violin.”

“Patch me through to my mother.”

Lilith came on the line in a few seconds. “Where are you?”

“I’m a mile from the Aghajari refinery.”

“Good. The rest of the team is ten minutes out. Leave a trail of bread crumbs for them.”

Violin patted her pockets to make sure that she had plenty of transponders. They were small and designed to look like discarded cigarette butts. All she had to do was crush the filter to activate the battery. All Arklight field teams had trackers.

“And, daughter?” said Lilith.

“Yes?”

“Be smart.”

“You trained me well, Mother.”

“I’m not talking about the mission. I trust you in combat. But you know nothing at all about men.”

Violin hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not a good liar, my love. I saw how you looked at Captain Ledger, and how he looked at you. I did not live my entire life in a cell. Don’t let infatuation or any other feeling affect you. Not now, not tonight. Be the warrior you are.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“‘Yes, Mother.’ I wonder if you heard a word I said.”

“I hear you, Mother. I’ll be careful and I’ll be smart.”

“Good,” said Lilith. “And there’s one more thing…”

“Yes?”

“When you face the Upierczi… I know some of them are your brothers.”

“Yes.”

“They are not family to us, girl. They are monsters. Show them mercy and they will consume you.”

In the darkness, Violin smiled. It was as cold as knife steel. “Mother-‘mercy’ was a lesson you never taught me.”

She disconnected the call and melted into the shadows.