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  “There are times, Captain, that people who share as many ideological and political differences as do we can share a compatible view of something else. In prisons, for example, even the most hardened murderers cannot abide a molester of children.”

  I said nothing.

  “Before we continue, Captain Ledger, let’s be clear on something,” he said. “I know that it was you who freed the spies last night.”

  “Don’t even try,” I warned. “Those three kids were hikers. They’re as close to being spies as I am to being a prima ballerina, and believe me I don’t look good in a tutu.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Are you really so naive that you believe their cover story? I would think someone of your caliber would be in the loop.”

  “I am. They’re not spies.”

  “This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered this kind of thing,” he said. “You always send ‘kids’ to spy on us. You think the veneer of innocence is more convincing than it is. The Peace Corps was created with CIA money. Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization… they’re all fronts and everyone knows it. It’s not even an ‘open secret’ anymore.”

  “Horseshit.” I said it loud enough to finally provoke the doofus bodyguard, Feyd, to take notice. I wanted to see how he reacted. He straightened and looked around like an old dog that had just woken from a deep sleep. Rasouli watched me watching and waved Feyd back with an irritable flick of his hand.

  “Of course, you would deny it,” Rasouli snapped. “You deny it because you think I’m wearing a wire?”

  “I don’t care if you brought a film crew.” I took a sip and set aside my cup. “What’s the play here? Did you really set this whole thing up, the snipers and all, just so you could debate politics with a tourist?”

  “Ah,” he snorted with a sour smile. “‘Tourist.’”

  “Ah,” I said with a nod in his direction. “‘Human being.’”

  “The spies-”

  “Hikers.”

  “‘Hikers,’ whatever, are not the issue, Captain. We will get them back.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. If I had to guess, I’d bet you a shiny ten-rial piece that they’re eating lunch at the U.S. embassy someplace safe. Kuwait, maybe.”

  “Then why are you still here?”

  “I’m doing touristy things. I even went to a few museums. Want to see my ticket stubs? Right now, I’m doing nothing more sinister than having a cup of coffee and reading the paper.”

  “While waiting for a pickup car, perhaps?” His smile faded. “Captain, let’s not-what’s the American expression? ‘Jerk each other off’?”

  I grinned.

  “Frankly I don’t much care about the hikers, even though I know you were involved.”

  “Yeah? How about the mosque bombing? You don’t want to try and hang that on me, just for shits and giggles.”

  “I have no interest in arresting you for anything.”

  “Better for everyone,” I said. “You wouldn’t survive the attempt.”

  “You are very sure of yourself,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am. I’m not saying that your guys couldn’t take me-we’re in your country, not mine-but not with you still sucking air. Might even be worth it, though.”

  If Rasouli was frightened by my threat he managed not to show it. “We are wasting time neither of us has.”

  “Okay. So why are we here? What do you want to talk about?”

  His eyes glittered like cold green glass. “Let us talk about saving the world.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Agriculture Building, 7th floor

  Tehran, Iran

  June 15, 7:59 a.m.

  “We have to go,” said the tallest of the four women. She was a blocky Serbian with a knife scar across her mouth.

  “You go,” said the Italian woman by the window. Although she was younger by twelve years than the Serbian and had less field time than either of the other two-a Castilian brunette and a French blonde-the Italian was the team leader. “I want to watch this.”

  The others nodded and began packing their gear-disassembling their sniper rifles and scopes-but the Serbian lingered. It was her laser sight that had danced over the heart of the American agent; it was hers that had wandered down to burn with ugly promise over his crotch. She would have taken that shot, too. Without hesitation or remorse. Now her black eyes bored into the younger woman’s.

  “Another team is already on Rasouli,” said the Serbian. “They’ll pick him up when he leaves the cafe. Why are we wasting time?”

  The Italian woman turned slowly away from the window and fixed her gaze on the tall Serbian. She held that stare for five full seconds, not blinking, not allowing a trace of emotion to change her expression. It was an old trick, one of Lilith’s-something her mother had used on her countless times-and it worked now, too. The Serbian’s eyes held for four seconds and then slid away.

  “I want to watch the American,” said the Italian, letting her gaze linger a moment longer before she turned without hurry back to the window. She made sure not to turn or acknowledge as the three other women finished packing.

  After the other two filed out, the Serbian lingered in the doorway. “The American isn’t our-”

  “I’ll decide who is and isn’t our concern,” snapped the Italian. When she was angry her tone was identical to her mother’s, and it shut the Serbian up as surely as a slap across the face. It did that with everyone. The Italian gave it a few seconds to set the mood, then she said, “Set up a surveillance post. Two cars. If Ledger leaves the cafe I want to know where he goes and where he’s staying. Upload surveillance photos and data to my personal file on Oracle.”

  The Serbian nodded so curtly that it looked painful. “And then?”

  “And then go back to the staging area until I call you.” The Italian made sure that her voice carried every bit of Lilith’s icy command. It was an illusion, borrowed power, but it was a useful skill that she’d begun cultivating before she was ten years old.

  The other women mumbled something and went out.

  When she could no longer hear their footsteps on the stairs she waited another thirty seconds, and then sighed, her shoulders slumping.

  Was it ever like this for Lilith? Probably, she thought, and wondered how long her mother had to fake being tough before she actually became the stone-faced, stone-hearted monster she was now.

  Knowing her mother as she did, that transformation had probably happened at a much younger age, maybe before she had been abducted by the Upierczi. If it hadn’t been there already, Lilith would never have escaped the pits, never have escaped the breeding pens.

  For her own part, the Italian woman did not yet feel that hardness developing within her own soul. Perhaps it all came down to how many people she had to kill, perhaps there was a line that, once crossed, burned away all softness. At twenty-five, the Italian woman could still count the numbers. Every head shot, every cut throat, every garroting and poisoning. Lilith? If even half of the stories were true, then her kills could fill a medium-sized office building. Or an entire graveyard.

  The woman believed that all of the stories told about her mother were true.

  Every last one.

  And everyone in the sisterhood expected her to be her mother’s daughter in every sense.

  She murmured a brief prayer in Latin as she bent to peer through the sniper scope at the two figures seated in the coffee shop.

  Joe Ledger and Jalil Rasouli.

  Why had she lingered to watch?

  The question flitted around in her head, fluttering like a bat after moths.

  Why?

  The obvious reason was to maintain surveillance on Rasouli, who-she hoped-did not know that the team he had hired had been actively surveilling him for three months. The Italian woman’s team was one of several who kept tabs on Rasouli and other key players in the Muslim world. Just as other teams ke
pt a close watch on significant persons in the Christian world. Adding to the general store of information about Rasouli’s whereabouts was the obvious answer to the question.

  Obvious, but a lie.

  The truth was something that she could never put into a field report. She would not know how to phrase it anyway. A gut instinct. A feeling. In her personal lexicon she called it a “flash.”

  They did not happen often and sometimes she never understood what they meant. However, there were too many times in her life when a flash-a moment in which her entire mind and heart were locked onto a single person-proved to be a turning point. Sometimes those flashes saved her life.

  Sometimes they forged an instant and inexplicable connection between her and the person who she was destined to kill.

  She stayed there, seated on a folding chair, her sniper rifle resting on a bipod which in turn rested on a stack of small, sturdy crates. Not watching Rasouli.

  She watched the American. The man who had identified himself as Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger.

  She liked the name.

  And she liked the man, which surprised her.

  Not for the obvious reasons, and even she was aware of that much. To be sure, Ledger was tall and fit, handsome in the rugged way athletes often are. Some rough edges, a few visible scars, a lean waist, and muscular shoulders. That wasn’t it, though.

  It was his eyes.

  Her sniper scope was of the finest quality. Very precise and powerful. Through it she had looked into the man’s eyes while he joked with her on the phone. She knew that he’d been afraid. Who wouldn’t be with laser sights on him? But he wasn’t afraid in the right way. His was a practical fear, of the kind that only warriors have.

  Warrior. She tasted the word. It was grandiose and yet it seemed to fit him quite well. More than that, though, was the hurt she saw in his eyes. Not hurt from anything related to this incident. Deeper hurt, older. That was something this woman understood more intimately than anything else. Her world was built on pillars of pain and suffering.

  Was it possible that this man’s soul dwelt in a similar tower? Was that why she felt the flash at the moment when she and her team had first trained their laser sights on him?

  If so, then it would genuinely hurt her to have to kill him.

  Chapter Eight

  Starbox Coffee

  Tehran, Iran

  June 15, 8:03 a.m.

  I stared at Rasouli. “Saving the world from-what?”

  He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Consider this. If scientists discovered than an asteroid was hurtling toward the earth and was likely to strike in one year, would it not be possible that the best and the brightest from all countries would drop their hostilities and work together to prevent a shared disaster?”

  The comment was so weird that it jerked my head into an entirely different place. At the same time my heart started doing another jazz riff. “Christ! Is that what this is about?”

  “What? Oh, no… no,” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “I speak hypothetically about the nature of our response to a shared threat too large for any one country to handle alone.”

  “Next time say so. You almost gave me a frigging heart attack.”

  He smiled at that. Jackass.

  “Okay,” I said, “Given the right kind of potential catastrophe, then that kind of cooperation is possible. Even so, red tape would be a bitch.”

  “And yet the red tape could be cut if the threat was more imminent, yes? Say that this hypothetical asteroid was due to strike in a month? The need for immediate and uninhibited action would necessitate a quicker exchange of information so that the situation could be handled. After all, global extermination trumps individual ideologies.”

  “In a rational world, yes,” I agreed. “Where are you going with this?”

  “There is a matter that will require very great and very careful cooperation.”

  He removed a cell phone from his jacket pocket and played with the touch screen to bring up a photo, then handed the phone to me. “Do you know what that is?”

  I stared at the picture and my mouth went as dry as dust.

  “ Good God…”

  “Indeed,” agreed Rasouli.

  I knew all about them, of course. I had to. I knew the history, studied them for my job, read the field reports. I had seen them in museums and textbooks and on the Discovery Channel. Knowledge may be power but at that moment I felt as weak as a child. Even as a picture on a phone-small and frozen in a snapshot moment of time-it was terrifying to behold.

  A nuclear bomb.

  “It is a Teller-Ulam design hydrogen bomb,” said Rasouli quietly. “It has a yield of fifty megatons, which is equivalent to fourteen hundred times the combined power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or, if you look at it another way, it has ten times the combined power of all the explosives used in WWII.”

  “Where is it?” I snarled, causing Rasouli to recoil from me.

  “Please,” he said soothingly, “this device is not on U.S. soil.”

  “Then why the hell are you showing me this?”

  “Because I need you to know that this is something larger than the political struggles between our countries.”

  “Your country has been trying to build this for years, asshole-” I began, but he cut me off, and again had to wave back his guard.

  “You don’t understand,” said Rasouli in an urgent whisper, “this is not ours.”

  I stared at him. “Then whose is it?”

  “I… do not know,” he said. “That is one of the reasons I wanted your help. It’s likely the device is one of many that have gone ‘missing’ since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Russian economy.”

  “Just so we’re clear,” I said, “you-Iran-you’re afraid of terrorists with a bomb?”

  “Yes.” His mouth was a tight line, “and I’ll thank you not to smirk. This is a very real threat that could cause untold damage.”

  “You have any suspects?”

  Rasouli shrugged. “We are not a popular country, Captain Ledger. It is the price of being powerful, as you Americans well know,”

  “Yeah. Seems like every five minutes there’s a fundamentalist nut job coming at us with a vest of C-4 and the name of God on his lips. Ain’t that a bitch?”

  All that earned me was a contemptuous sneer. “This is hardly on the level of car bombings, Captain. Whoever is behind this is organized, extraordinarily well-financed, and subtle. I have reliable sources within Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Taliban and I am convinced they are not involved.”

  “They aren’t the only players.”

  “No, but they are the ones most likely to consider such a radical plan; and the smaller cells and splinter groups could never make one of these.”

  “They could buy one,” I said.

  “Of course, but it would be very expensive. Prohibitively so. Most organizations do not have that much money.”

  “Hugo Vox could buy one of those with his beer money.”

  “Why would he? His day is over.”

  “Why? Because the Seven Kings are off the board?”

  “No,” said Rasouli. “My sources tell me that Vox is ill.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rasouli’s green eyes glittered. “He has cancer, didn’t you know?”

  “Shit.”

  It was good and bad news at the same time. Good news because it was nice to think about Vox rotting away. Bad because that was a much easier exit strategy than he deserved.

  “Could be his last blast,” I said, meaning it the way it sounded.

  I thought about what I said but then dismissed it. Vox is many things, but he has never struck me as vindictive. Murderous, to be sure, and merciless, but not petty. To detonate a bomb in frustration for dying of cancer…? No, that would be cheap, no matter what the death toll.

  I tried to build a case for it in my mind, but gave it up. It didn’t fit Vox’s pattern at all. For him, kil
ling was only ever a pathway to profit. Even so, I’d want to run this past Mr. Church, Rudy Sanchez, and Circe O’Tree. They built the profile on him that was being used by every law enforcement agency in the world.

  “If it’s not Vox,” I said, “then we’re looking at someone who has as big a bank account.”

  “Would you like me to recite a list of nations who would love to see Iran reduced to scorched earth?”

  “Not really, because you’d start your list with the U.S., Israel, and Great Britain, and they don’t need to buy black-market bombs.”

  He shrugged. “That is not entirely true. A case can be made for why such countries would want to have bombs that could in no way be traced back to them. Bombs from former Soviet countries, perhaps.”

  “Fair enough. But is that your pitch? Are you saying that it’s America or one of its allies?”

  “No,” he said tiredly. “If I thought that, then this discussion would be held in the world press, backed by all of the considerable outrage which it is possible for our propaganda department to muster. The Ayatollahs would probably enjoy that.”

  “Bottom line,” I said, “can you tell me where this thing can be found?”

  “Much worse,” he said. “I know where four of these things can be found.”

  The whole world froze around me.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Worse still,” Rasouli said in a voice that sucked the last shreds of peace from the morning, “there are at least three more that we have not been able to locate. And one of the others might even be on U.S. soil.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Kingdom of Shadows

  One Year Ago

  He was the King of Thorns.

  The King of Blood and Shadows.

  He lived in a world of darkness, and that darkness was so beautiful. So subtle. It hid so many things from those who lacked the power to see. It was his mother, his ally, his weapon. It was the ocean in which he swam, the sky through which he flew, the dream in which he walked.