Eric Lustbader - The Testament

Djura lunged at Bravo, his hands up and grasping, but Bebur stepped in front of him.

Khalif threw up his hands. "Are we to be enemies now for real?" he cried.

"We are not enemies." Pushing back against Djura, Bebur eyed them. "But don't mistake our loyalties. We will not follow your orders."

"Even if they make sense?"

"We will not wait for the mosque." Djura pointed to the terraced high-rise. "Up there we'll have the perfect vantage point."

Khalif nodded, and Bravo knew better than to protest. The decision had been made; for good or ill, the die had been cast.

Watching them retrieve their rifles from the backseat of his car, Khalif spat onto the concrete. "Don't underestimate them."

"I don't like it, it's an emotional decision."

"No, my friend, it's a business decision," Khalif said. "In killing Mikhail, Cornadoro crossed an unforgivable boundary. The sons have no choice. To protect themselves and their interests, their revenge must be swift and merciless. Otherwise, scenting weakness, the vultures will follow and eventually the sons will lose everything Mikhail worked so hard to build."

Up on the eleventh floor, Bebur insisted on unlocking the front door. Djura brushed by Bravo with no hint of animosity or grudge; his hostile reaction had been purely of the moment. Once they had assured themselves that the apartment was secure, they allowed Khalif and Bravo in. Bravo watched as they stepped gingerly out onto the terrace, which overlooked the front drive and, far below, the blue expanse of the sea. Despite their bravado, their continuing sense of responsibility toward his safety was touching.

After conferring among themselves, Djura came back in, heading out the apartment's front door, presumably to cover the building's rear service entrance, while Bebur hunkered down, peering through his rifle's sniper-scope in anticipation of seeing Cornadoro's truck.

Bravo called out and, as Djura turned, he crossed the living room.

"I appreciate everything you've done." He held out a hand. "I'm glad you have my back."

Djura looked him straight in the eye and without changing his expression one iota took Bravo's forearm in his heavy grip. Bravo did the same. Saluting like ancient Romans on the soon to be blood-soaked battleground of Erzurum or Tabriz.

Khalif led Bravo into the kitchen.

"Fancy a beer?" he said, hand on the refrigerator door handle.

"You've got to be kidding."

Khalif laughed. Depressing a hidden lever, he pulled on the door and the entire refrigerator swung open, revealing a hidden suite of rooms. As they stepped through, Bravo saw that the refrigerator was hinged on two sets of concealed gimbals.

Khalif's workspace was cold as the interior of the refrigerator through which they had come. It was sealed, HEPA-filtered, entirely self-contained. Heavy blackout drapes hid the windows so completely that not even a crack of daylight seeped through. Banks of electronic equipment, much of it incomprehensible to Bravo, lined two entire walls from floor to ceiling. It was like a twenty-first-century library: devoid of books, for that matter of any printed material, overflowing nonetheless with information that kept arriving invisibly, as magically as the water-filled buckets of the sorcerer's apprentice.

Khalif seated himself at the center of this metropolis of intelligence. Bravo, beside him, read off the list of frequencies Emma had sent. As it happened, Khalif had electronic copies of them all. Hardly surprising, given what Bravo had recently learned about his father's methodology in tracking down the identity of the traitor inside the Order.

The next step was to isolate Uncle Tony's rogue cipher, the parasite deep inside the intestines of the main carrier report. There was no point now in trying to decrypt the ciphers-that would come later. What he wanted to ascertain was who had taken the encrypted message as it was en route from London to Washington.

This proved simpler than he had imagined, since Khalif quickly discovered an electronic file-composed by Dexter Shaw-of all the retrieved rogue ciphers. Clearly, Dexter had been working on decoding them. There was no record of how successful he had been, though Khalif searched the database thoroughly.

Impatient, Bravo said, "Let me take a look."

Khalif slid out of the way and Bravo, fingers dancing over the workstation keyboard, returned to the original carrier reports as they had been when they'd left Uncle Tony's London location. First, he engaged the audio spectrum-analyzer to pinpoint the moment the rogue cipher had been plucked out of the main text, but when that failed he was forced to think a bit more in depth.

Surely his father would have followed his line of reasoning. He would have used the spectrum-analyzer and any number of other electronic aids in his attempt to find the precise moment the rogue cipher was taken. And he had failed. Bravo sat back, silently contemplating the wall of gadgetry, as sophisticated as a spaceship's control panel, which winked and blinked back at him like some dumb animal. He needed to return to the beginning, to find another line of reasoning that wasn't so obvious-that had not occurred to his father. He needed to make the dumb animal moo.

There was another way, there was always another way. He sat still as a statue, immersed in furious contemplation. Forget about finding the precise moment of acquisition, that was a dead end. It occurred to him then that there was no need to stay within the Order's frequency, that was the beginning of the dead end. If he was to truly return to the beginning, he needed to listen outside the frequency.

He asked Khalif to analyze the surrounding frequencies from the beginning of Uncle Tony's report. Khalif obliged, but again the readouts showed nothing but the norm. The damn dumb animal still refused to moo.

Djura, carefully wending his way through the cinder block bowels of Sinope A Blok, loaded Tac-50 beautifully balanced in his hand, was feeling good. An unwanted weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Being shackled to the American had rankled, gotten under his skin like a burr he couldn't reach. A warrior the American might be, but he was not family, not blood; he could betray them at any moment, as all Americans were known to do when the lure of money, power, cultural hegemony beckoned to them. Their corruption was complete, from the flesh down to the soul. Their naked greed, the measureless avarice would, in the end, prove to be their undoing, of this Djura had no doubt. But until that end arrived with the suddenness of an apocalyptic thunderclap, their gluttony was a contagion-at all costs to be avoided.

That Mikhail and his sons were capitalists bothered him not at all. They made money, yes, lots of it, but, like him, they had faith, which led them to use their wealth to help their people back in Georgia, rather than keep a revolving stable of young women, rather than buy out Tiffany's or the nearest Rolls-Royce dealership.

He had seen what remorseless corruption came from the sprawl of the American lifestyle. How could he not? It was all around him, as if he swam in a sea infested with plastic bags filled with iPods of American music, DVDs of American films, cassettes of American TV shows, all in loud and joyful praise of celebrity and consumerism. Not that Djura didn't enjoy a pink Internet peek of Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson, astonishingly exposed in various positions of sexual congress. The illicit nature of the moving images detonated like bombs on his retinas, providing a thrill he could not begin to define, let alone understand. But that was it; having taken these bites out of the rancid confection of American culture, he was certain his appetite had been sated. Unlike his brother Gigo, who had swallowed it whole and was now importing drugs and "Russian wives" from his five-bedroom triplex in the eternal golden sunshine above Miami Beach.