“Denied,” I said. “If I have to deal with this stuff then so do you.”
“Permission to shoot myself?” she asked hopefully.
“Let me get back to you on that.”
“Where the Christ do we start?” asked Bunny.
“Nukes,” suggested Khalid. “We have to start there. But… that’s problematic. I mean, do we have even a clue as to the players and their teams?”
“Lots of clues, but no idea where we stand with them,” I said.
Khalid shook his head. “Where does Rasouli fit into this? How does it make sense that he brings this to us?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”
“Whatever it means, he seems to be the only one on our side,” said Lydia. “Kind of makes me feel dirty.”
“Good dirty or bad dirty?” asked Bunny, which earned him a hard elbow in the ribs.
“Okay,” Top said slowly, “all of this is fascinating as shit, but who has the damn nukes?”
“We don’t know,” I admitted. “Though the Sabbatarians seem to think it’s the Upierczi.”
“Why the hell would vampires want nukes?” demanded Bunny. “I mean… they’re fucking vampires, right?”
“Guess they want to blow something up,” answered Top. “Same as anybody.”
I told them about the conversation I’d had with Hu and Church about the Upierczi and my still-in-the- development-stage doomsday theory.
“Right,” said Top, “Okay, I’m with Lydia now. I’d like to catch a cab back to the real world.”
Bunny shot him a sour look. “Which real world would that be, old man? This time last year we were shooting zombies.”
“Yeah,” Top conceded. “Fuck me.”
Chapter Eighty-One
On the Road
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:59 p.m.
“That doesn’t answer the question of why these Upierczi want to blow up the oil fields,” said Khalid.
“No it doesn’t,” I agreed. “So when we get one of these pointy-toothed bastards in a corner, I want him kneecapped and cuffed and then we’re going to have a group therapy session with him, feel me?”
“Hooah,” they agreed.
“If Rasouli knows about the nukes,” asked Khalid, “isn’t this something the State Department and NATO should be handling?”
I said, “We are not in a position of trust. Rasouli came to us on the sly, and he clearly didn’t trust his own government.”
“Swell.”
Bunny leaned forward. “Look, I don’t like to be the one to piss in the punchbowl here, Boss, but how come we’re not all shouting the name Hugo Vox? I mean, vampires notwithstanding, does anyone really think that he’s not the Big Bad Wolf here? He’s already wanted by every law enforcement agency on the planet. Shouldn’t outing him to the authorities as the main villain be a natural next step to finding and stopping the vamps from triggering five sonofabitching nukes?”
“Seven,” corrected Khalid.
“Seven sonofabitching nukes. Jeez. My point is-”
“We can’t do much about him for now,” I said, “because we don’t know his exact role and we don’t know where he is.”
Top gave me a shrewd look. “There’s something else, ain’t there? I can see it in your face, Cap’n, there’s more to this.”
“There’s one more thing.” They all came to point, eyes sharp and focused, waiting for me to drop the last bomb. “When I took out the first Sabbatarian team today I obtained a briefcase which had, among other things, materials that had to have come from Vox.”
“What kind of materials?” asked Top.
“A list of all DMS staff as of the end of last year. And… the names and addresses of everyone’s families.”
If I’d dropped a flash-bang into the center of the room I couldn’t have hit them harder. Top’s eyes went wide and his lips parted in a silent O. He had an ex-wife back home, and a daughter who had lost both her legs in Baghdad when a mine blew up under her Bradley. It was the reason he joined the DMS, and now he was thousands of miles away from being able to stand between them and an unknown group of killers.
I held up my hands. “Church knows about this and he’s taken steps. Everyone on that list is going to be taken into protective custody.”
“Which won’t mean shit if Vox is behind this,” growled Top. “He had people wired into the cops, the FBI, everywhere. Probably still does.”
“I know, but Church is on it.”
Top looked at me with a stare so hard and cold that it felt like physical blows.
“We didn’t start this war, Top,” I said. “We have to count ourselves lucky that we found that list. It gives us a chance.”
We sat in silence thinking about the possible consequences. If I hadn’t found that list, if the Sabbatarians had been able to move on it, the resulting carnage and grief would have destroyed the DMS at its core. Even if we survived, the damage done to us would be like third-degree burns on our psyche. We’d never recover.
“Vox,” said Top. Just the name, but it had so much meaning; he said so much with it.
“Vox,” I agreed.
Lydia cleared her throat and glanced at me. “What exactly are we supposed to do when we find the weapons?”
It took effort to turn away from Top. “What would your guess be?”
She shrugged. “Locate and secure each nuke, de-arm the weapons, and have a meaningful conversation with anyone left who still has a pulse. Then go home and drink a gallon of tequila.”
Everyone laughed. It was all forced, though. Even Top measured out half an inch of smile. “Now you know the game plan,” I said.
Bunny asked, “Is there any kind of evacuation plan in case we drop the ball?”
“Evacuate who, Farmboy?” snapped Top. “The entire Middle East? How exactly do we do that?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Okay, we’re waiting for the go-order to hit the Aghajari oil refinery. It’ll be a quiet infil. Locate and de-arm.” I opened my tactical computer and called up the mission files uploaded by Bug. “First thing we have to do is study the layout of the refinery according to the blueprints Rasouli provided, matching them against satellite photos and intel from our own sources. I want six ways in and ten ways out.”
“Hooah” said Top. No one else joined him.
“Then I want you to pair up and buddy-test each other on the wiring schematics of the Teller-Ulam bomb and its variations. Swap teams every half hour. Everybody knows what everybody else knows. We don’t want surprises and missed cues when de-arming the nukes. Hooah?”
“Hooah.” All of them said it this time.
“After that, everyone gets rack time.”
“Sleepy soldiers are clumsy soldiers,” said Khalid, then punctuated it by quietly going, “Ka-booooooom.”
“Hoo-fucking-ah,” said Bunny.
