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  He removed his right hand from his pocket and raised it to show the small black plastic device he held.

  “Yup. Detonator. The case also has two pounds of C-4 in it. Probably won’t kill everyone down here, but it’ll turn both of us into clouds of pink mist and bring down a hundred tons of rubble on the rest.

  Grigor’s pale face went whiter still and he took an involuntary step backward, forking the sign of the Evil Eye at Vox and barking out a few sharp words in a language Vox could not recognize.

  “Okay,” said Vox in a hushed tone that did not carry beyond the small circle of lamplight in which they stood. “Now we know whose dick is bigger. Let’s cut right to the chase. You think I came down here as a gofer for the Scriptor. Pretty apparent now that it isn’t the case. Though the Scriptor thinks it is. He thinks I’m kindly old friend of the family. I can’t begin to tell you how fucked up LaRoque is. He has no insight into people at all. He’s known me his whole life, knows about the Seven Kings, and still thinks I’m just some guy he can send on errands.”

  He took a step forward. Grigor tensed, clearly debating whether to attack or run, but Vox showed him the trigger. A red light glowed beneath the arm of the detonator. “Dead man’s switch. I die, you die. Stop thinking bad thoughts and let’s see if we can talk serious business.”

  To his credit, and to Vox’s appreciation, Grigor’s body gradually relaxed and he held his ground. Still on the dais, a king of death looming above the king of fear.

  “Why have you come here, then?” asked Grigor. “What do you want?”

  “I’m here because you need me.”

  Grigor smiled, revealing his unnatural teeth. “What I need from you I could take.”

  Vox shivered despite himself. “Christ, don’t do that, you big freak. I’m trying to talk business here.”

  The candlelight glimmered on the wicked points of Grigor’s fangs. Vox licked his lips. It felt like the cavern floor was tilting under him. The moment was as terrifying as it was surreal, but he stood his ground even as sweat poured down his face and stung his eyes.

  Finally, Grigor allowed his smile to fade and the fangs slowly vanished. He sat back in his chair. “Then talk business.”

  Vox let out a tremendous sigh. “Jesus H. Christ,” he growled. “You really groove on your own mystique, don’t you? Shit.” He used his free hand to mop his forehead with a handkerchief, and despite the fact that every nerve he possessed screamed at him to run, he took a step closer to the foot of the dais. Grigor arched an eyebrow in surprise, or perhaps in appreciation for the nerve that such an action displayed. Vox said, “Since you know about the Kings, then it’s only fair that I tell you that I know everything about the Red Order, and I do mean everything.”

  He watched Grigor’s eyes, saw them jump in surprise, and saw how Grigor looked quickly away to hide his reaction.

  “That is between you and the Scriptor,” said the pale man.

  “No it isn’t,” replied Vox, and Grigor’s eyes settled once more on him. “When I say that I know everything about the Order, that means everything. That means I know about the Upierczi.”

  Grigor leaned forward. “And what is it that you think you know?”

  “I know why you really want the names of all the arms dealers … and it’s not to buy guns, no matter what LaRoque says.”

  “No.”

  “What’s a gun to someone like you? Maybe twenty years ago, maybe before you guys got your ‘upgrade.’ Yeah, don’t look so surprised, Grigor. I told you I know all about you. I know how strong you’ve become. I don’t think Charles LaRoque has a fucking clue.”

  Grigor did not correct him this time.

  Vox took another step. “I know that despite being called a ‘knight,’ the Red Order thinks of you as a slave. They treat you like slaves. You are slaves.”

  In a pale and dangerous whisper Grigor said, “What else do you know?”

  “I know that your slavery is about to come to an end. You want to break the chains. You want to stage a slave revolt that will make Spartacus and the gladiator rebellion look like a frat party.” Vox smiled. “Don’t you?”

  Grigor’s eyes burned with red flame. “Yes.”

  “And,” said Hugo Vox, “I want to make sure that happens. That … and so much more.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tactical Operations Center (TOC)

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn

  June 15, 12:49 a.m. EST

  Jerome Williams—“Bug” to everyone—sat amid a web of computer terminals, screens, coaxial cables, encoding buffers, and other equipment, and all of it inside a big glass box. Two inches of reinforced glass and a sophisticated multiform entry scanner separated him from the fifty other people in the sprawling Tactical Operations Center. The TOC was a monument to computer-driven sophistication, and rising like an obelisk was the primary processing tower of MindReader. That, too, was safe behind the bulletproof glass and guarded by two unsmiling soldiers with M4s.

  Bug glanced up from his keyboard at the flow of people in the TOC. Some were hunched over workstations connected through monitored sockets to MindReader’s servers; others spoke on phones or milled like frenzied insects, going about the thousand crucial tasks related to the current crisis.

  Despite the constant flow of cool air into his fishbowl, Bug was sweating heavily. Six rogue nukes. Just the thought of those weapons hidden out there terrified him. Violence was such an alien concept to him, despite where and for whom he worked. Most of the time it was an abstraction, a crazy concept no more real than the aliens, monsters, orcs, and zombies he battled in video games. He knew that the problems the DMS faced were real, but they weren’t real to him. He had never heard a shot fired in anger, never saw the enemy anywhere but on a computer screen. It was easy to stay detached if you lived like that.

  Bug was a small man. Thin, spare, slightly hunched from a life spent at the keyboard. His work for the DMS was usually pure support. Crack a code, break through an anti-intrusion firewall, steal some guarded information. Fun stuff. Even when providing real-time intel for the field teams there wasn’t much actual pressure on him. After all, MindReader was the fastest computer on the planet. The basement of the hangar had a cold room lined wall to wall with a supercomputer cluster. The primary computer block was made up of three thousand premarket upgrades of the Tianhe-1A system which flew at a speed of 2.507 petaflops. That was more than thirty percent faster than the Cray XT5 Jaguar. Sometimes Bug would sit with his palms flat on the MindReader obelisk and feel the power surging through him. That was real to him.

  But today … the real world seemed to have found a way past all of his personal anti-intrusion systems. Fear was like an unbearably shrill sound in his ears.

  “Find those other devices.” That’s what Mr. Church had said to him before the Big Man went in for his conference with the president. Not “try” to find them. Find them.

  It was on him.

  Him.

  He closed his eyes and breathed in long and deep through his nose. The air in the fishbowl was ripe with the hot-wire smell of ozone. A beautiful smell.

  “Come on, baby,” he said aloud as his fingers hovered above the keyboard. “Come on, my baby. Don’t make me do this alone. Talk to me…”

  Almost as if in answer to his plea, a bell softly pinged.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Park Avenue and McMechen Street

  Bolton Hill

  Baltimore, Maryland

  June 15, 12:53 a.m. EST

  The bedside phone began ringing at precisely the wrong moment. Circe O’Tree was naked, covered in sweat, painted by candlelight, and on the verge of screaming as she moved in a frenzied pace up and down. Her black curls danced above her bouncing breasts as the rhythm drove her up and up and up toward the crest of climax. Beneath her, drenched and straining and grimacing with the beginnings of his own orgasm, Rudy Sanchez growled out her name over and over again.

  The phone
kept ringing.

  They ignored it. They were only aware of it on some distant level, their immediate need transforming the intrusive sound into a mere component in the symphony of sounds and sensations. The music from the speakers, the sounds from the street outside of Circe’s window, the creak of the bedsprings, the urgent slap of flesh against flesh, and their marathon panting breathing were all parts of something much greater.

  “Oh, God!” cried Circe as the orgasm reared above her like a dark wave of velvet beauty, and she screamed incoherently as he came too. Together they spun to the edge of the precipice and plunged over, crying out each other’s names, saying meaningless words, making sounds provoked by sensations that were beyond even the most precise articulation.

  The phone rang through to voice mail.

  Circe collapsed onto Rudy, showering his face with many small, quick kisses as beads of crystalline sweat dripped from every point of her onto his skin. He gathered her in his arms and kissed the hot hollow of her throat and her cheeks and her eyes and finally her lips.

  The phone began ringing again.

  They ignored it.

  It rang five times and stopped.

  Circe could feel Rudy’s heart beating as insistently as hers. She clung to him, her body wrapped around his.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  “Te quiero,” he murmured.

  Then his cell phone began ringing.

  They both glanced at it.

  “Let it go,” she said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. They did not move as it rang through to voice mail.

  There was silence. Circle let herself fall off of him in delicious slow motion, his arms around her to catch her fall and keep her close. Rudy looked at her. Lean and yet ripe, tanned skin a shade lighter than olive, and eyes that held more mysteries than he could count. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever touched; the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Movie-star beauty coupled with a fierce intellect and a personality as complexly faceted as a diamond. He took a strand of her hair and held it to his nose. It smelled of incense and wood smoke and sex. He wanted to tell her all of this, but in more poetic terms, and he fished for words that would convey what he felt without sounding like lines cribbed from old movies.

  “I—” Rudy began, and then her house phone started ringing.

  And her cell.

  And his cell.

  All at the same time.

  “Damn,” Circe said.

  Rudy cursed quietly in Spanish as he stretched an arm over and picked up both cell phones. Circe took hers and answered first.

  “Dr. O’Tree.”

  “Where are you?” asked Mr. Church.

  She closed her eyes and mouthed the word “Dad.”

  Rudy looked at the screen display on his. It said TIA. Aunt. Aunt Sallie.

  He nodded to her.

  “I’m home,” she said.

  “How quickly can you get to the Warehouse?”

  “Why? I’m off this week. I have to do revisions on the chapter on—”

  “That can wait.”

  “But it’s important.”

  “Not as important as this,” said Mr. Church.

  Circe sighed and considered smashing the phone against the wall.

  Then Mr. Church said, “Bring Dr. Sanchez with you.”

  Before she could ask a single question, he disconnected.

  All of the phones went silent.

  “What?” asked Rudy, and Circe told him. Then she buried her head against his chest.

  “I hate this,” she growled. “I hate that he can just pick up a phone and ruin a perfect moment for me.”

  “I expect,” said Rudy, “that he hates it too.”

  She looked at him for a moment, reading his eyes. She sighed again and nodded. “Damn it.”

  Five minutes later they were in Rudy’s Lexus breaking speed laws all the way to the Warehouse.

  Chapter Twenty

  Warbah Island

  The Persian Gulf, Near the Mouth of the Euphrates River

  Kuwait

  June 15, 8:57 a.m.

  Top Sims sat on the edge of the open door of a stealth helicopter. The helo was a model Top had never seen or heard of before last night—a Nightbird 319, a prototype variation on the OH-6 Loach used by the CIA during Vietnam but updated with twenty-first-century noise reduction technology, better construction materials, and radar-shedding panels that made the craft look like it was coated in dragon scales. The Nightbird had skimmed a few yards above the sand as it crossed the Iranian border, flying well below radar and inside the bank of total darkness provided by the rocky landscape. Almost totally silent beyond two hundred feet, it used special rotor blades that thrummed out a much softer vibration signature than that used by regular helicopters. If the pilot had not sent Top a locator signal, the two cars would had driven right past them in the night.

  Echo Team abandoned the cars and crammed themselves and the rescued college students into the chopper, but then they had to endure a terrible two minutes of waiting and praying as a phalanx of Iranian Shahed 285 attack helicopters came sweeping across the star field above. Top was very familiar with those birds. Each Shahed was rigged with autocanons, machine guns, guided missiles, antiarmor missiles, air-to-air and air-to-sea missiles. Seriously badass, and Iranian helo pilots were no fools.

  However, the helicopters swept past and then split into two groups, heading north and south along the border, their surveillance systems looking right through the bird on the ground.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” breathed Bunny. The three former hostages were panting like dogs. Khalid was murmuring prayers in Egyptian.

  Top felt every one of his very long, very hard years settle over him as he exhaled a deep breath and closed his eyes.

  “We’re clear,” said the pilot over the intercom. The rotors spun up to a higher whine—though still eerily quiet—and the Nightbird lifted off. “Next stop Kuwait. First round’s on me.”

  That was ten hours ago.

  Now the three freed American college students were with their families. Laughing and weeping, hugging each other, kissing their families and each other. A happy ending and for once no one had died. Despite his weariness, it made Top feel like there was some clean air to breathe in the world.

  Bunny sat nearby on an overturned milk crate, sipping Coke from a can. Khalid was throwing grapes into the air and catching them in his mouth. Lydia, who had found her own way out of Iran, had her boots off and her feet in a bucket of cool water.

  The three of them looked like they were at a picnic, but Top wasn’t fooled. He knew every trick in the book about the “fake it till you make it” approach to regaining personal calm. All of them were feeling it. Anyone who ran this kind of game or played in this league felt it; but all of the nerves, the fears, the existential doubts were wrapped tight in affectation and shoved out of sight of the rest of the world.

  To let it show would be to admit openly that they were human, and they couldn’t do that. Not on the job. Not in front of people. Not when there was another mission ahead, and another after that.

  Top ached for the cigarettes he’d given up fifteen years ago. Or maybe a nice cigar. That would give his hands something to do, and concentrating on the smoke rolling down into the lungs and then swirling out again was something orderly and controllable. Even if the cigarettes were killing you, the process of lighting, inhaling, holding, exhaling, watching the smoke, shaping it with lips and tongue as it flowed out, and tapping the ash—all of that was deliberate process. Process was part and parcel with calm. But he didn’t have a smoke and promised his ex-wife that he would never start again. So, instead he chewed a piece of gum very slowly and precisely, and he grinned at the hikers and their families.

  It was Bunny who finally spoke, starting the process of talking about it. “Smith should be here pretty soon.”

  Top nodded. Smith had called from a border post right before climbing into a jeep with a Kuwaiti se
rgeant. “Any time now.”

  A few seconds blew by on the hot wind.

  “You think the Cap’s okay?” Bunny asked.

  Khalid caught two grapes in his mouth, bobbing and weaving like a boxer to get under each of them. “Cowboy’s always okay.”

  “Uh-huh,” agreed Top. It was a lie, though. Their captain spent as much time being stitched and splinted as the rest of the team put together. And they all knew that he was half crazy. Maybe more than half crazy. No one had the details, but rumors had leaked out in DMS circles that Captain Ledger had a party going on in his head. Not that it mattered to them. As far as Top was concerned, the captain could have the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Ave Maria” in his head and it didn’t change a thing. Ledger was their captain and their friend, and they’d follow him into hell. Top thought about that and smiled ruefully. They had followed him into hell.

  His earbud buzzed and he tapped it. “Go for Sergeant Rock.”

  “Sit rep,” said Mr. Church crisply.

  “Sir, all quiet on the western front. Waiting on Chatterbox and Cowboy.”

  “Give me a status report on combat readiness,” interrupted Church.

  Top winced and almost cursed aloud. He was bone weary, and he ached for a hot bath, a cold beer, and twenty hours of sleep. Preferably with someone curvy, brown, and warm snuggled up against him.

  “Always ready to rock and roll, sir,” he said with energy in his voice that was a total fabrication. “What’s the op?”

  Khalid and Bunny shot him looks that went from inquisitive to surprised to murderous in the space of a second. Top spread his hands in a “what can I tell you” gesture.

  Bunny bowed his head and sighed. “Oh, man…”

  “We are at Firehall One,” said Church. That rocked Top and slapped all the fatigue from his nerves. Firehall was DMS combat code for a nuclear threat.

  “Jesus…”

  “Acknowledge,” snapped Mr. Church.

  Top stiffened and the others caught the sudden jerk of his body. They clustered around him.

  “Acknowledge Firehall One, sir,” said Top, and the others exchanged stunned looks. “Echo Team is ready to respond.”