“Nukes would accomplish that,” said Circe.
“How?” asked Rudy. “Beyond simply blowing things up.”
“You know the saying ‘fire purifies’?” asked Circe. “If the oil fields were destroyed and the land laid waste by radiation, there could be no further conflict over there.”
“What are we discussing here?” asked Rudy with a crooked smile. “A doomsday cult?”
Circe wasn’t smiling.
“ Madre de Dios,” breathed Rudy.
Chapter Fifty-Three
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 12:29 p.m.
Once we were past the markets, the streets became empty and quiet. No human or car traffic. No sign of Violin, no sign of the Red Knight, but I didn’t like the vibe. The atmosphere was supercharged with tension. I knew that a lot of it was nerves. This whole thing was freaking me out. Truly and deeply.
Haven lay right up the street, though, and I was already starting to breathe easier.
The best safe houses were run by the CIA. They’d been at this longer and they spent a lot of time developing teams to run and oversee the locations. The one Ghost and I headed to was at the fringe of a garment district, with an open lot on one side and a hardware store that was closed on the other. A “For Sale” sign was hung in the window of the store, and I suspected the Company owned that as well.
The safe house was occupied by husband and wife agents. They were a real married couple recruited years ago. Taraneh and Arastoo Mouradipour. Midthirties. His cover was a textile salesman, and she was floor manager for a small factory that made children’s clothes.
Ghost and I walked past the house twice, once from across the street heading west, then on the same side as the house going east. Everything looked normal and quiet. A ten-year-old blue Paykan was parked outside, its paint job faded by sand and heat, several rust spots coated with primer. The only other vehicles in the area were a pair of white vans parked in the lot of a telephone installation company a few blocks away.
We walked all the way around the block and then cut down the alley that led to the open lot. I walked along the side of the house. Back door and side windows were intact. Everything looked calm, which is exactly what I wanted to see. Calm sounded pretty good to me. I needed a bath, food, a first aid kit and a chance to make a private call to Church. There was so much I needed to tell him.
When we reached the front of the house I went to the door and knocked.
Ghost, who was still sluggish, flopped down on the step and looked like he was about to go to sleep. I was getting worried about him. There was no way to tell how much damage the Taser had done, but Ghost was definitely not himself; his senses were clearly dulled and his energy almost bottomed out.
There was no immediate answer. I knocked again.
The protocol was to knock no more than three times. After that you walk away and try another safe house. I didn’t want to walk into another house filled with blood and death, so I was willing to split if this didn’t play out. The next closest was a convenience store half a mile from here. However, I doubted Ghost had that much energy in him. I could sympathize. That goon in the hotel had really rung my chimes and now that the adrenaline was wearing off I could feel it.
I was about to knock a final time when I heard the lock click. The door opened a half inch and I saw a woman’s eye peer at me through the crack.
“Yes?” she asked.
“May I speak with Mr. Pourali?”
That was the current code, and it changed every few days.
“Who is calling?” she asked, right on cue.
“Mr. Hosseini.”
“Please come in,” she said, stepping back and pulling open the door.
I clicked my tongue for Ghost, who jerked awake and scrambled to his feet. He followed me inside.
“Thank you,” I said to the woman as she closed the door.
Ghost froze in place and let out a single sharp bark of warning, which was two seconds too late.
The woman produced a small black automatic from under her robes and pointed it at my face.
Chapter Fifty-Four
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 12:35 p.m.
“Inside or I’ll kill you where you stand,” she snapped, and she said it in English. Not good English, but good enough.
Ghost was trembling, caught between the impulses of his instincts and his training. I was pack leader and I hadn’t given the command to hit.
“January,” I said. It was today’s clarification code word. If this was all a big mistake then the code word would dial everything back to normal.
She said, “Shut up.”
Not the code reply I was hoping for.
I heard a floorboard creak behind me, and Ghost growled in time to warn me… but not in time to protect himself. As I whirled two men rushed at me through the doorway to the living room. They were not Red Knights, but that was the only consolation. The first threw a handful of powder in my face, blinding and gagging me; the other hurled a weighted metal-mesh net over Ghost. On another day, Ghost would have dodged the net and torn the man’s throat out, but the Taser had blunted all of his edge. Ghost cringed, caught in fear and indecision, and the net slapped down around him. He howled in anger, thrashing and twisting to get away from it, but his struggles only wrapped the thing around him. He tripped over it and crashed to the floor.
I saw this through a haze of powder.
I tried to paw the stuff out of my eyes. It was cloying and thick, but it didn’t seem like poison and it didn’t actually hurt. Then the guy who threw it stepped in and planted a mother of a punch into my solar plexus. The sucker punch slammed all of the air out of my lungs and dropped me to my knees. I honked and wheezed and gasped like a salmon on a river bank. The pain was enormous but the lack of air was ten times worse. I could not breathe.
“Shoot him!” barked one of the men, and I felt the cold barrel of the gun jab me in the back of the neck.
“Say the word, Victor…” growled the woman. She had a low, nasty voice. She wanted to pull that trigger.
“No!” cried the other man-who I assumed was Victor-and there was the sharp sound of flesh on flesh as he slapped the woman’s hand away. “We have to be sure.”
They weren’t speaking Persian. They spoke broken English and it sounded like each of them had a different native accent, but I was in no condition to analyze it.
Ghost whined and barked, but he couldn’t come to my rescue. Between the net and the Taser, he was done. I was on my hands and knees, blinking and gagging, my whole body heaving with silent convulsions.
The first man bent close to me. “You can see it, Victor! Look how he reacts. The powder is already doing its work.”
As I fought to control my traumatized diaphragm I struggled to process what they were saying.
The stuff they threw in my face definitely wasn’t poison or some kind of knockout drug. From the smell I think it was garlic. Regular, fine-grain, powdered garlic. Not exactly the kind of thing the bad guys usually throw. What
