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.