CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 1:14 p.m.
When I came back to the living room, Ghost was standing over Krystos, growling right in the man’s face. Krystos cringed back as far as he could but he was trapped by a hundred pounds of furious canine.
“Down,” I snapped.
Ghost stopped growling but he held his ground, the hair standing stiff along his spine.
“Down!” I said again, but this time my tone was quiet. Ghost glared at me and uttered another low, threatening growl. There was no danger left anywhere else in the house. The growl was aimed at me.
“Down,” I repeated a third time, and after another moment of hesitation he lowered himself to the ground, but all of his muscles were tensed as if he was about to spring. I deliberately turned my back on him, the way a confident pack leader would. At the moment I wasn’t feeling all that confident. Dogs are smart, but when they’re hurt and confused their thinking can get dangerously skewed. From Ghost’s perspective, his pack leader was leading him into one painful situation after another.
Once more I squatted down in front of Krystos. I interrupted him in the middle of a prayer. His color was bad and he sat in a puddle of his own blood. I reached out and felt for Constantin’s pulse. He didn’t have one, and I felt a weird flash of irritation that he’d managed to duck out before we could have a meaningful chat.
Krystos watched me do it and read the news on my face. He closed his eyes for a moment and repeated the dead man’s name several times. Greasy sweat ran in rivulets down Krystos’s face.
I poked him on the forehead with a stiffened finger. “Pay attention, sparky.”
“I am praying for the dead!” he snapped.
“Did you pray for the people upstairs?” I snarled.
He faltered. “Yes. I… I mean that the others would have done this.”
“Before or after they tore out their fingernails?”
He looked at me with eyes that were glassy and bright. “They are the enemies of God!”
It was so hard not to yell back, to try and shout him down and make him understand that nobody’s God orders something like this. I wanted to make my case; I wanted to knock some sense into him. But-really, what would be the point? How could I ever make someone like him budge from an entrenched stance that was hundreds of years in the making and backed by a papal order? This wasn’t one of those debates where I could slide around to try to see things from his perspective. As the saying goes, that way lies madness.
The rage was hard to keep in its box, though. It burned in my mouth and in muscles, and it tingled like electricity in the dangerous tips of my fingers. When I trusted myself to speak normally, I asked, “Who told you I would be coming here?”
“I–I don’t know,” he said. “We got a call. My team was ordered to come here to do God’s work and-”
“Who made the call?”
“I don’t know.”
I searched his face for the lie but I think he was too scared to pull any new stunts on me, and unfortunately that meant that he was probably no more than a grunt. A foot soldier in a war that was out of step with reality and with my real mission. The nukes.
“How many more of you are there?”
His mouth tightened with either pride or defiance. “Enough.”
“Don’t get cute with me.”
“We are the Army of God,” he declared. “We will never stop hunting. We will never cease in our war.”
He said all that in awkward, broken English, but I got the point. I wasn’t impressed.
“All of this is because you want to rid the world of vampires?”
“No-not that. That is not our mission. We want to save the world from the Upierczi.”
“Upierczi? That’s another word for vampire, right? So, with all that’s going on in the world-wars, poverty, religious intolerance, disease-you ‘priests’ spend your time and resources hunting vamps?”
“Yes.”
“ Why? ” I demanded. “’Cause right now I’m thinking you psychopaths have done a lot more harm to the world. What makes you better than them?”
His face took on a contemptuous cast and with an imperious tone, he said, “We fight to save the world. They want to destroy it.”
“And how do they plan to do that?”
“They want to blow it up.”
I sat back on my heels and stared at him. Again he read my expression and he nodded.
“The Upierczi have hidden for centuries,” he said. “Now they are in the light. Now they attack openly. They have great weapons. Why else do you think they would reveal themselves to the world?”
“What do you mean by ‘great weapons’?”
“Great,” he repeated, letting me take the obvious definition from that.
Oh shit.
“How do you know this? Are you working for Rasouli?”
He looked blank.
“Hugo Vox?”
Krystos shook his head. “I do not know these names.”
“Who sent you here?”
“A priest of our church. He will know what you have done here. He will call down the wrath of the Almighty on you.”
His accent was atrocious but his message was clear enough; but I wasn’t buying. I’m pretty sure I could handle myself against a priest.
“I’ll take my chances,” I told him, but he sneered.
“Father Nicodemus will lay waste to your world. He has promised this!”
That, I thought, was mighty damn interesting, and it made me wonder whose side Nicodemus was on. There was Nicodemus with the Seven Kings last year. Nicodemus with the Red Order, and now Nicodemus with the Sabbatarians who were clearly enemies of the knights employed by the Red Order.
Who in hell was Nicodemus?
I left the room once more to call this in to Church, but got Aunt Sallie.
“What the fuck are you still doing at that house?” she bellowed.
“Trading Pokemon cards with the vampire hunters.”
“Why are you calling?”
When I told her about Nicodemus, Auntie shut up for a moment, then said, very grudgingly, “Good work. Now get out of there.”
“I wish I could spend some more quality time with this clown to see what else I can get.”
“If wishes were horses,” she said.
“Yeah. Tell you what, Auntie, much as it sounds goofy to say out loud, I think we need to take a look at this from the vampire doomsday perspective. I’m starting to think that maybe the Red Knights have the nukes.”
“We will, but I doubt whether your friend Krystos had that right. Circe and Dr. Sanchez have forwarded the idea of a doomsday cult.”
“You don’t buy it, though?”
“Do you?”
“No, but my logic is kind of goofy.”
“Big surprise,” she said. “Tell me.”
I said, “Answer me something first. Circe dismissed the changing into bats stuff, and we know that bullets kill the knights, so that’s two bits of folklore down the crapper. But, what do the reports you’ve collected about the Red Knights and real-world vampires say about immortality? That’s supposed to be a real theme with vampires, right?”
“Nothing lives forever, but from what little we know about the Red Knights, they’re supposed to be exceptionally long-lived. Not necessarily immortal, but with lifespans far exceeding ordinary humans.”
“Okay, so they’re immortal-ish. Enough so for the sake of argument, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Then tell me why immortals would want to destroy the world. No way that makes sense.”
Aunt Sallie grunted. “This isn’t like you, Ledger. This is very clever thinking. Let me run it by Deacon and Dr. Hu. In the meantime, Deke wanted me to text you. We have a safe house location that has been triple verified. It’s close to where you are now, and Echo Team will meet you there in a few hours. It’s an apartment over a convenience store. Deacon knows the man who owns it.”
“One of his ‘friends in the industry’?”
“No, just an old friend. Jamsheed Mustapha is a good man. We’ve worked with him in the past. Good guy, so try not to get him killed.”
I let that pass. “What about Krystos?”
Auntie said, “That’s your call.”
She disconnected.
I still had the phone in my hand when I went back into the living room. Krystos looked at me with mingled hope and dread, but his mouth continually repeated a prayer of deliverance.
“Well,” I said, “turns out that it sucks to be you.”
I shot him through the heart.