The Iran-Kuwait Border
June 16, 6:30 a.m.
Charles LaRoque sat hunched in one corner of the limousine as it raced toward the border checkpoint between Iran and Kuwait. Forty miles and they would be out of the accursed country.
Across from him, Father Nicodemus appeared to be dozing.
LaRoque’s phone rang and he snatched it up, looked at the screen display, and punched the button.
“Where are you?” asked Vox.
“Nearly to the border. We’ll be out of the country in less than an hour.”
“Good. Things are going to hell here. Get out and lay low, and I’ll call you when the dust settles.”
“What about the bombs?”
Vox laughed. “You’ll know if they go boom.”
“Goddamn it, Hugo.”
“Look, Kuwait’s safe ground. Grigor isn’t targeting that. But once you get to the airport go somewhere really safe. Outside of the prevailing weather patterns. Fallout drifts, you dig?”
LaRoque glanced at Nicodemus, who was smiling in his sleep.
“How could so many things go wrong all at once?” asked LaRoque. “I thought you said it was all under control.”
“Yeah, well,” said Vox. “Shit happens.”
Vox was laughing as he disconnected, and LaRoque frowned. His father had trusted Vox, but his grandfather had not. Now LaRoque wondered which one truly knew the man.
“Father-?” he asked.
Nicodemus opened one eye. “What is it, my son?”
“That was Vox.”
“Yes,” said the priest, as if he had heard the conversation. Perhaps he had. He was sneaky like that.
“Were we wrong to trust him?”
“‘We’?” The priest smiled. “I wouldn’t say that we were wrong to trust him.”
LaRoque stared at him in puzzlement, confused by the inflection.
“I’ve always trusted Hugo. Ever since he was a boy.”
“What? But I… I thought… you said you didn’t know him before this.”
“Oh,” said Nicodemus. “Yes, that was a lie.”
“What?”
“I do that,” said the priest. “Lie, I mean.”
“What are you talking about?”
The priest gestured to LaRoque’s pocket. “Look at your mirror. Tell me what you see.”
Deeply confused, LaRoque removed the compact from his jacket and opened it. The top mirror showed his own troubled face, mouth turned down in a frown, brows knitted. Then he angled it to show the bottom image.
It was the priest’s face. It was not the first time LaRoque had seen the priest in his mirror, but there was something different about it. The face was much younger, less seamed and spotted. A healthy face that was nonetheless un healthy. Diseased in a different way. The face was grinning-the merry, devious grin of a trickster.
“Sir Guy was a trusting fool, too,” said Nicodemus. “That’s why I loved him. You, however, are a disappointment even as a pawn. I’ll have to find some new toys.”
LaRoque heard the words, but he could not tear himself away from the image. As he watched the trickster opened his mouth and blew out his cheeks in a huge exhalation. But it was not air that he exhaled; instead a burst of living fire erupted from between the lips of the face of the demon in the mirror.
Sixty yards above the limousine the Nightbird 319 stealth helicopter hovered without lights in the endless predawn darkness.
“Target acquired.”
A voice on the radio headset said, “You are cleared to fire.”
The pilot squeezed the button and launched a Hellfire missile. It struck the car in less than one second and a massive fireball blasted upward from the hard-packed sand of the Iranian desert.
“Target destroyed,” reported the pilot, his voice bland, detached.
“Return to base,” said Mr. Church.
The helo banked left and flew toward the Kuwaiti border. The ground-based radar looked right through it as it vanished.