monitored? Especially since the rebirth? You’re more of a threat to him than ever, and he knows it. Just as he knows that the Order isn’t as strong as it used to be. The Agreement’s in pieces, and you know as well as I do that Rasouli is never going to restart the Shadow War. That fucker wants a true jihad. Guess who will be caught in the middle? Guess who LaRoque will use as cannon fodder to force a new Shadow War? Do you honestly think LaRoque or Nicodemus cares a wet fart about you?”
“So what?” sneered Grigor. “Let them come for us. Let them hunt us in the tunnels.”
“Jesus, man, do you ever listen to yourself? Stop auditioning for the remake of Dracula and pay attention. LaRoque isn’t going to come after you himself. He’s too afraid of you. No, he’s leaked information to the authorities. To the DMS, to that agent Ledger, the one who killed your son at the hotel. LaRoque will go into hiding while Special Forces teams come after you, and believe me they will hunt you through the tunnels, and there are a lot more of them than there are of you.”
Grigor was silent, and Vox smiled to himself. Nice. Now it was time to play his final card. The one real kicker. The one that would take all the chips on the table.
“Grigor… there’s one more thing.”
“What?” demanded the King of Thorns.
“The American Spec Ops teams have allies in this. Allies who can help them find you and hunt you.”
“Who? Those Sabbatarian fools? We laugh as we kill them-”
Vox said, “Arklight.”
The sound Grigor made was somewhere between a snarl of animal hatred and a hunting scream. Vox leaned away from the phone, wincing. He thought he heard the name Lilith in there somewhere. Vox was sure he had never heard so much hatred directed at a single person before.
It made his groin throb.
“Give me that password,” seethed Grigor. “I will show them a war like nothing they have ever seen. I will drown them in lakes of blood…”
Vox stopped listening to the tirade. He tapped in the password that would activate the code scrambler he had given Grigor. The scrambler, with its powerful satellite uplink that could send detonation codes to those lovely nuclear devices.
As soon as the password went through, Vox called up the file of all DMS personnel and their families and sent that too. What the hell. The Sabbatarians didn’t seem to be getting the job done. Let Edward the Sparkly Vampire and his undead hordes tackle it. That sounded like a whole lot of fun. Maybe Grigor would be the one to finally tear Deacon’s throat out. How sweet would that be?
Vox disconnected the call halfway through Grigor describing how he would crack his enemies’ bones and suck out the marrow. Or something like that. Vox didn’t care.
All of his cares were over.
Chapter One Hundred Three
Arklight Camp
June 16, 5:02 a.m.
Church had a complete tactical operations board in his Humvee. It was a new design, one that used flexible circuits for a display board that could be erected in curved panels to form a large semicircular arena. High-res images and holographic overlays created a three-dimensional model of the two theaters of operation. Louisiana and the Middle East, and this latter was subdivided into four separate locations: the Aghajari oil refinery in Iran, the Beiji oil refinery in Iraq, the Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, and the Toot oilfield in Pakistan.
Small glowing dots indicated the transponder signals from the teams that were moving into position.
A central screen showed Aunt Sallie and the TOC at the Hangar. Church was an observer here, watching Auntie run the show.
“All teams on station,” said Aunt Sallie, who was seated to his right at a gleaming command console. “WMD alarms and hot loop equipment stowed. OPs pulled in. All personnel report alert. Infil teams one through six report ready to move immediately. We are at REDCON-One. Waiting for the word.”
Church sensed movement and saw Lilith standing by the opening to the little arena, and he waved her inside. She studied the display and nodded approval.
“You always did like your toys,” she said with a faint smile.
“High technology used correctly allows for the greatest efficiency,” he murmured as he tapped keys to bring up another smaller set of display windows. This showed the screens that Rudy, Bug, and Circe were looking at. He and Lilith leaned forward to study them.
“Is that the translation?” asked Lilith.
“Yes.” He touched a button to open a line. “Circe, what do you have?”
“MindReader has decrypted four percent of the Book so far and about twice as much of the Voynich manuscript. Each one is different, and each is very disturbing in its own way.”
“How so?”
“The first few pages of the Book of Shadows is the Holy Agreement, and it’s what we expected. The Red Order and the Tariqa agree to work together to do ‘what is necessary’-that’s the phrasing they were apparently most comfortable with-in order to ‘lead the people to faith and to fealty to God in all things,’ yada yada. Essentially, it’s an argument in favor of hate crimes. Or maybe we should call them ‘faith crimes.’ Something like that. The rest of it though… my God! It’s a kind of history without commentary. It lists every single thing both sides have done to carry out the Agreement. If the whole book is like this, it will be the most complete confession of guilt ever recorded. Hundreds of thousands of deaths. More if you count wars that were started or extended because of the Holy Agreement. We even found a section that shows that the Order influenced Pope Clement V to disband and excommunicate the Knights Templar because the Red Order needed their fortune and resources to continue their private war. That will rewrite a lot of history books. Actually-this all will.”
Church didn’t comment. “Keep at it,” was all he said. He muted the audio feed.
He turned to Lilith. “This is what you wanted,” he said. “You can take this to the world court, to NATO, to any group of governments and they will start a new version of the Inquisition to hunt down anyone responsible, anyone still connected to the Order or the Tariqa.”
Lilith stood with her hand to her throat, considering it. “It doesn’t take down the Upierczi. Unless we can produce a body, no one will believe that they even exist.”
“They are slaves of the Order,” said Church. “Perhaps one of them will give the Upierczi up as part of a deal.”
But she shook her head. “This is where you and I differ,” she said. “You think Nicodemus is the power behind all of this. Nicodemus and now Vox. I don’t.”
“You think it’s Grigor.”
“I know it is. I can feel it in my bones, in my heart.” She closed her eyes. “I lived in one of his cells for fourteen years. He took thirteen children from me. Ripped them from my womb, one after the other. I can’t even count the number of times he raped me.” Her eyes were as hard as fists. “I know what his dreams were. It may have been the LaRoques who brought in the scientists and paid to have Upier 531 developed-but it was Grigor who demanded it. Yes, he demanded it. He made the Order repair the bloodline of his kind. It fulfilled a dream he had. He talked about that dream incessantly. In the night, in the long dark when no one from the Order was down there in the tunnels. Grigor talked to himself, to his people, about the dreams of the Shadow Kingdom. I would lay there at night, naked, filthy, starving, chained to the wall with an iron collar around my ankle, listening to the echoes of his words whispering through the darkness. You call them slaves, but they see themselves as warriors. A race of warriors. The Red Order kept them in shackles through faith, and then when God would not save the Upierczi, science did. Do you think that lesson was lost on Grigor?”
“What’s your point?”
“Look at it from Grigor’s perspective. At first the Upierczi were a scattered race of genetic freaks, or at best a dying and failed offshoot of Homo sapiens. The Red Order found them and gave them purpose, but for centuries kept them in chains. They are called knights, but they are slaves and they know it. Over the centuries, despite the
