Rudy.
“Sure, and vampires were myths,” I pointed out.
“Ah,” he conceded.
“It’s always good to keep an open mind,” Church said quietly.
“Are we tracking any groups whose symbology includes a vampire motif?” I asked. “Some weird cult? Anything like that?”
“Only two,” said Church. “The Red Knights and another group that may be the same as your Inquisitors.”
“Let me guess… the Saturday People?”
“What?” asked Circe. “They’re Sabbatarians?”
I said, “According to Krystos.”
“Sabbatarians,” she repeated, “are people born on Saturday.”
“So what?” I asked. “So was my nephew. He doesn’t run around stabbing people with pointy sticks.”
“No, in folklore the Sabbatarians are monster hunters. The old beliefs come mostly from Greek legends, but it’s found in other places, too. People born on the Sabbath are supposed to have special powers. They can see evil spirits and they are empowered by God to oppose supernatural evil.”
“Were they connected with the Inquisition?”
“I can check, but I don’t know. That’s not to say they weren’t. We’re paving a lot of new ground here,” Circe admitted. “I have a colleague, Jonatha Corbiel-Newton, she’s probably the world’s top scholar on vampire legends. I’ll call her and pick her brain. Covertly, of course.”
Rudy sighed. “Until five minutes ago I thought we were looking for nuclear weapons. Now we’re hunting vampires.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “This is definitely one case, but don’t ask me how they relate. We came into this wa-a-a-y too late to make sense of it without a guidebook.”
“So it seems,” said Church. “Here’s the rest. Vox is definitely connected with this matter at several points. Some of that intel comes from a source connected to the woman, Violin. When you have more time I’ll give you a more complete briefing, but for the short term, Violin is considered a friendly.”
“She saved my life, so I’ve got some fuzzy bunny feelings for her.”
“She is part of a deep-cover special ops group operating independently of any government. Their code name is Arklight. They have no political or national affiliation and very few friends. Their story is a long and very sad one. If the situation requires it I’ll have Aunt Sallie give you a briefing. Their leader uses the code name Lilith. She’s fierce, highly dangerous. Underestimate her at your peril.” And then he filled me in on what he knew of the Red Order, the Scriptor, the Tariqa, the Murshid and, saving the best for last, he dropped the bomb about Nicodemus.
“That’s it,” I said. “I quit.”
Church ignored me. “A lot of what we know is in bits and pieces. Let me make some calls and see if I can get more useful information. In the meantime, Captain, get what you can get out of Krystos, but don’t take too long with it. You eliminated their team, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have backup. Unless Krystos has direct knowledge of the nukes, he is a distraction rather than a pathway to a solution. Find out what he knows and then get out of there. I’ll call around and when I can verify a genuinely safe safe house, I’ll text the information to you.”
“Good. Before I go… where are we on the flash drive and the nukes?”
Circe and Rudy gave me the bullet points of what they’d found. Church wrapped it up by saying that field agents were working to verify the four known targets, and to remind me that Echo Team was already inside Iran and heading my way.
“First good news I’ve had all day,” I said, and disconnected. I pocketed my phone and leaned against the wall for a moment.
“Vampires,” I said aloud. There was no doubt in my mind that, as Rudy observed, this was probably some freak of genetics. I believed in God, but, contrary to what Mr. Church said, I didn’t much believe in angels, demons, or monsters. Ghosts? Maybe. Vampires of the supernatural kind? Nope; and the word still didn’t fit right in my mouth.
Chapter Sixty-One
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.
