the flash drive but didn’t think either Rasouli had told me or that I’d had a chance to check the drive’s contents? Or was the nuke thing a big surprise to him?
Or did I not yet know enough to ask myself the right question?
Yes, muttered the Cop in my head.
The Warrior was still freaked out about the goon with the fangs. When you spend most of your life training in martial arts, military technique, and the specialized skills of special ops as I have, you come to accept that combat in all of its forms is a science. It’s largely mathematical. If you hit someone in a specific part of the body at a precise angle and with sufficient force there is a predictable response, give or take some necessary variables. The same applies for a wide range of things, from lifting a barbell full of weights to shooting a pistol at a target. For some of this stuff there are thousands of years of trial and error as well as data collection to support what we know. Not what we guess but what we know. When you separate it all from sports or esoteric pursuits, combat is a science. I’ve dedicated my life to that science; if I have a church then that’s it.
However, what I just experienced did not make sense according to anything I knew or believed.
I will rip your throat out and drink your life. The killer’s voice kept whispering that to me.
I pulled out my cell and called Church.
“Go,” he said.
“Boss, I am having a really, really bad day,” I said.
“Are you talking about the devices?”
“Not directly.”
“I’m on with the president. Do you need immediate assistance or can you wait ten?”
“I can wait ten,” I said, “but not eleven.”
“Understood.” Church disconnected.
I sighed. In a very odd and childish way I felt snubbed by Church. I recognized it as a human overreaction to great fear mingled with physical injury. I needed Mommy or Daddy to kiss the boo-boo and tell me everything’s all right. So, yeah, I’m immature at times. Just like everyone else.
I found a cracked bowl and filled it with clean water for Ghost. While he drank, I tried to assess my current situation. It was like inventorying a Kansas trailer park after tornado season. I hurt in so many places I stopped counting. My arms throbbed from blocking his punches and kicks, let alone those spots where his shots had actually landed. When I pulled up my shirt I saw huge red bruises forming; the intensity of color a clear indication of the amount of tissue damage he’d inflicted. Last time I had bruises like that was when I’d taken a pair of heavy-caliber rifle rounds in my vest; the Kevlar had kept me alive but the psi of the impacts had to go somewhere.
Ghost looked up from his bowl, water dripping from his snout. I doubt Shepherds could identify bruises by sight, but his sensitive nose could probably smell the blood seeping through the damaged muscle tissue.
He whuffed and began drinking again.
“Whuff,” I agreed.
I dearly wanted to curl into a fetal position on my couch and sleep until November. Alternately, six shots of Jim Beam and a gallon of beer would work well as comfort food; but I was deep in Indian country, and there were hard miles to go before I had any kind of comfort.
“If you’d gone to the damn FBI academy you could have been politely arresting people between afternoons on the golf course,” I reminded myself. All of my inner voices told me to shut the fuck up.
The coin-operated washers and dryers were full but no one was down there. I jammed the cellar door shut, then I turned on the faucet in the laundry sink and held my head under the cold water for almost a minute. The water that sluiced over my scalp ran red for almost half that time. The cold knocked the pain level down a few notches though, and I could feel my brain reluctantly starting to clear.
My phone rang. Church was early. Sputtering and pawing water out of my eyes, I pulled my phone and punched the button.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Hello,” she said. “How many brownie points do I have now?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 10:04 a.m.
“Ah… shit,” I said into the phone.
Violin laughed.
“That was you?” I asked.
Instead of answering she asked, “How badly are you hurt?”
“Why do you care?”
“ How badly are you hurt? ”
I sighed. “Somewhere between trampled by a soccer mob and found dead in a ditch, but… I’ll live. What’s it to you, anyway?”
Violin took a beat before answering, and even then she didn’t answer the question. “You’re lucky.”
I clicked the button to initiate the trace. Not that I thought it was worth the effort, but what the hell. “Lucky? In what way?”
“The knight should have killed you.”
“‘Knight’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Another pause. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this.”
“Will it keep me alive?”
“Maybe.”
“Then tell me, for Christ’s sake. That son of a bitch nearly tore my head off. You should have seen him. You should have seen his frigging teeth.”
“I have-”
“He had fangs for- Wait, what?”
“I have seen his teeth,” said Violin. “Not that same knight, of course, but I’ve seen their teeth.”
“When? How?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you should not have seen him at all.”
“Meaning that I shouldn’t have and still be alive? Like that?”
“Like that, yes.”
I was quiet for a moment, thinking it through. “What are they?”
She took her time before answering. “I don’t know for sure, Joseph.”
“I think you’re lying to me. And what’s with the ‘Joseph’? Why so formal?”
“I like ‘Joseph’ better than ‘Joe.’ ‘Joseph’ is more dignified, more serious than a ‘Joe.’”
“I have to warn you,” I said, “I’m more of a ‘Joe’ personality type.”
“We’ll see.”
“Wait, rewind a second. You called that guy a knight. Knight of what? Round Table? Columbus?”
“No,” she said. “I can’t tell you that without approval.”
“Whose approval?”
She didn’t answer.
“You’re wasting my time, girl,” I said. “I’m going to hang up now and get my ass out of here.”
“You can’t,” she warned. “The knight was dropped off by a car and it keeps circling the block.”
“You’re still watching my hotel?” I asked, not sure if that was a comfort or another layer of worry to stack on top of everything else.
“Yes, and if you go outside they’ll see you. The best thing you can do right now is wait.”
“I don’t want to be here when the cops arrive.”
“I’m monitoring the police channels. No one has reported a thing.”
Which is what I expected, but didn’t say so. “What if they send in another of these knights? Or a whole team
