Jonathan Maberry - Assassin's code

Then I suddenly lost all interest in the crates, the crowbar, the dead bodies, and every other damn thing. I could feel the blood in my veins turn to ice water. My guts clenched as I saw what sat on the far side of the crates.

It was there.

Sixty feet away. It squatted there in the center of the big cavern. Sitting out in the open, all by itself except for thick power cords that coiled like snakes toward the nearest wall.

Huge, powerful, feral. Sophisticated in a brutal and primal way.

Deadly as hell.

My heart started beating as fast as Ghost’s and all the spit in my mouth turned to dust.

“God,” I murmured, but I was looking at the devil.

The bomb.

Aghajari Oil Refinery

Iran

June 16, 6:05 a.m.

I moved toward it. I wanted to run. God, I wanted to run for my life.

I kept moving toward it, drawn to the sheer enormity of what it represented at the same time as I was totally repulsed.

Ghost was right with me, but he seemed happy to be away from the dead, which is weird. Dogs like smelly, rotting stuff. He should have been having a field day cataloging all the scents. He wasn’t.

The device was larger than I thought. Four feet high, six wide, eight long. The data on these models gave a weight range between eight hundred and sixteen hundred pounds. This one looked bigger, maybe a ton. I wasn’t going to slip it into a pocket and run out of here with it, and I wasn’t going to sneak it out on a hand truck.

I was going to have to de-arm it.

I tapped my earbud again in the vain hope that somehow there was a signal. Nothing, and glancing over my shoulder at the heap of corpses I had a pretty good idea why. Whatever was happening, whatever the Red Order and the knights, or the knights themselves, had running-the infiltration, the communications jamming-was happening now.

The only thing that kept me from having a stroke right there was the thought that there were a couple of dozen of our unknown hostiles here at the refinery. Not the time to detonate the device.

Hopefully they were not suicide soldiers.

My inner Cop told me to shut the fuck up and pay attention to the task at hand.

I used my forearm to wipe sweat out of my eyes, then took a long steadying breath, and focused my mind on the PDA strapped to my forearm. I tapped the keys to pull up the de-arm procedures for the nuke. I scanned it to refresh my mind and then scrolled back to the first step.

“Okay,” I said aloud, hoping that my voice sounded competent and calm. Maybe tomorrow I’ll cure cancer. About as likely.

I have a little bit of religion. Not much, just enough to get me to church on Christmas and Easter. I wasn’t much for personal prayer. Not like my friend, Rudy, who was a staunch Catholic. However, as I removed my tool kit on the cowling of the beast, I was praying as hard as I could.

My tools were all made from an ultra-high-density polymer rather than metal. Plastics are nonconductive. The steps sound easy. Remove the screws holding the cover plate in place, disconnect the wires leading from the battery or the timer to the detonator. Sounds easy, but this is where you’re most likely to encounter a booby trap. Trembler devices, fake wires, micromotion detectors, heat sensors. If nothing goes boom at that phase you hit the whole red wire-blue wire thing.

I slowly unscrewed the six screws and checked to make sure that there wasn’t a trip wire rigged to an anti-intrusion trigger. There was no wire visible. Sweat ran down my face and stung my eyes. Ghost smelled my fear and whined nervously. I held my breath as I removed the plate.

Nothing went boom.

I set the plate down and addressed the wires. The leads from the battery were easy to spot. And, yes, they were red and blue. Always have to appreciate the classics.

There was a second plate covering the electronic trigger device. This was the brains of the machine, a computer that operated the neutron trigger and would fire it as soon as the activation code told it to. In devices like this, the code could be radioed in or hand-entered. I glanced up at the rocky walls. No, maybe the device on the oil platform in Louisiana could be activated via radio, but no radio signals at all were getting in here. They must have come and hand-entered it. As soon as I removed the plate I should be able to determine how much time was left before detonation. With any luck it would not already be ticking. Ideally, a two-hundred-year countdown would be nice.

I gingerly removed the screws and lifted off the plate.

And stared at the digital screen display.

“What the fuck?”

The bomb was not ticking away its last few seconds.

All of the little lights were dark. The timer wires were not even attached.

I stood up and backed away from the device.

The bomb wasn’t live. Not yet.

I wanted to fall down. Swooning like a Victorian maiden seemed like a proper response.

The universe so rarely cuts me a break that I usually don’t recognize them, or believe in them, when they show up.

Nevertheless here it was.

“Ghost old buddy,” I said. “I think we finally got lucky.”

There was a sound behind me. A soft scuff.

I spun around. I knew what I would see standing in the dark behind me.

A Red Knight.

But I was wrong.

There were two of them.

So much for luck.

Arklight Camp

June 16, 6:06 a.m.

Church swiveled in his chair, looking from one screen to another. On each of them the teams were in motion, but on the Aghajari screen the little glowing dot that indicated Joe Ledger had winked out.

There were two possible explanations. Either he was deep underground, or his transponder was damaged. Neither optioned seemed to be a happy one.

Church touched the communications button. “Talk to me, Auntie.”

“The ball’s in play. Riptide Team reports zero resistance, no apparent hostiles. They’ve taken the rig and are searching for the device. SEAL Team Six is in the water checking the underside and the drill head. Landshark Team is inside the Beiji refinery but no joy so far. Same for the Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia. Only resistance is at the Pakistani site. We have satellite and predator surveillance, but, as yet, bubkes. Local military were on-site for an inspection and they encountered Zulu Team. At present no shots fired.”

“Keep me posted.”

He turned to the screen on which the remaining identification codes were posted. V/I, M/S, and J/I. Circe’s face looked at him from an adjoining screen.

Lilith had been staring at these for minutes now.

“This doesn’t make senses,” she said. “In the previous codes, the I in A/I had been Iran. But J doesn’t fit with Iran’s other refineries, nor does V. And there is no M refinery in Saudi Arabia. Why change the code in the middle of a single list?”

“It’s not LaRoque’s handwriting,” said Circe. “Bug checked it against samples he found in the computer records at the foundation for which LaRoque sits on the board. He has a clunky style in print and a scrawling cursive. This is elegant. Toomey in handwriting says that the style and grace is indicative of a highly trained person, probably with Catholic school education. Someone who has spent much of his life writing in cursive. LaRoque’s young enough to have grown up with computers and e-mail.”

“LaRoque’s father is out,” said Lilith. “He would have been alive when the Order first tried to buy the nukes, but he’s long dead now.”

“It’s not Hugo’s,” Circe said. “Grigor?”

“No. I’ve seen his handwriting. It’s as terse and brutal as he is.”

Church said, “Nicodemus.”