The old man sagged to his knees and his head slumped forward but he did not fall over, and Brother Julius marveled at the horror and beauty of it all: the devout traveler ending his pilgrimage in a posture of supplication.
More quarrels hissed through the air and Brother Julius wheeled as the caravan horses began to scream when the steel-headed missiles tore into their flesh. One reared high and lashed out, striking a nun on the cheek and snapping her neck with a dry-stick crack.
Brother Julius ran then. The other pilgrims were clambering over the ruins of the old fort as arrows struck sparks from the broken stone. The riders—a dozen Saracens in billowing desert cloaks—rode toward them like the horsemen of Saint John. They yipped and yelled and laughed as they fired their last volley of quarrels and then they hooked their crossbows over their saddle horns and drew their swords with a rippling wave of silver.
Brother Julius tried to leap over a fallen pear tree, and the skeletal fingers of a branch snagged the hem of his robe. The cloth caught fast and Julius fell flat on his face with a
whooomph
! Sand puffed up, filling his nose and mouth. He rolled onto his side, gagging and coughing.
Behind him he heard shrill screams and the sound of pain-filled voices pleading to God even as sword blades cut into them. Brother Julius closed his eyes and tried to mutter a prayer between fits of coughing. Soon the screams stopped but the dull-wet sound of steel on flesh continued for almost a full minute.
Then there was silence.
Brother Julius tried to crawl away, but he heard the crunch of a foot on the sand beside his head and he looked up into the face of one of the killers. The man had dark eyes and black hair that fluttered in the breeze. He had a thin mustache and a spiked beard on the point of his chin. He was not smiling; instead a look of sadness was painted over his features. And his face … there was something terribly wrong about his face.
“Make your peace with God,” said the killer.
The clothes were Saracen, as were the armor and fittings. Even the decorations on the horse that stood nickering behind him were of Saracen make. But the man spoke in French.
“W—why … why are you doing this?” demanded the monk. “I don’t understand. For the love of God—
why?
”
The killer raised his sword. “It is for the love of God that we do this. And may God have mercy on all our souls.”
The sword flashed downward and Brother Julius felt himself detaching from the heat and the sand and his own flesh. He felt himself falling into darkness, into mystery.
* * *
The swordsman placed a foot on the monk’s chest and pulled, tearing his blade free from where it had wedged deep in the bone. Then he dropped the weapon on the sand by the monk.
He turned and looked at his companions. Two of them were busy with the task of cutting off the heads of the pilgrims. They were laughing as they worked, tossing the heads like children playing with toys.
“Stop it!” growled the swordsman, and the men froze in place, their smiles disintegrating from their faces, their eyes instantly ashamed. He plucked at his robe with disgust. “Do you wear these and then forget who you are?”
Then two men glanced at each other, and then bowed deeply to the swordsman.
“Forgive foolish sinners, brother,” said one.
The other, too ashamed to speak, merely nodded.
The swordsman walked over to them and placed his hands on their shoulders. The other warriors sat on their horses, chins buried on their chests, looking troubled and sad and weary.
“My brothers,” said the swordsman, “battle is like strong wine even to the best of us. We become drunk on it, and we must guard against that. When we are done, I invite you all to join me in prayers to God in which we will ask for forgiveness of our sins and guidance for all things to come.”
The men nodded. The swordsman turned to the men on the horses. They too nodded.
“Then let us be about our task with the reverence to which it is due.”
No one spoke, but they nodded again and set to work.
Without laughter or games they collected the heads of the pilgrims and stacked them into a mound in the middle of the pilgrims’ road. Another caravan of the faithful was due along this path in less than half a day. They set the head of Brother Julius atop the pile. They placed a ring of hands around the mound, and in each hand they placed a holy cross. Then the men formed a circle around the mound and fished for the fittings of their codpieces. Without meeting each other’s eyes, they pulled out their penises and urinated on the mound, on the hands, and even on the crosses.
Last of all, the swordsman used a sharp stick to write a curse against all crusaders in the hard-packed dirt by the ruins. He concluded it with a description of how Pope Innocent III sodomized young boys and sheep. It was a filthy description, but it looked almost elegant when written in the flowing Arabic script.
The swordsman was weeping as he flung the stick away from him as if it was covered in offal. He stripped off his Saracen robes and folded them into a tight bundle before shoving them roughly into a saddle bag. He stood for a moment letting the wind dry the sweat-heavy dark brown hooded cape with a white cross embroidered on the left shoulder. The cross was not the plain outline of long post and short crosspiece, but was instead made to look like a dagger laid across a longsword, with both overlaying a red circle. The other men also shed their disguises to stand revealed. They stood in a circle around the devastation they had caused, and each of them bowed their heads in prayer.
“God forgive us,” murmured the swordsman, leading the prayer. “And God grant that the pilgrims see and understand what they
must
understand.”
“Amen,” said each of the gathered men, and they said it gravely and with honesty.
With that, Sir Guy LaRoque turned away and walked with a heavy heart toward his horse. The trustworthy men of the Red Order of the Knights Hospitaller followed.
It had begun.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The Warehouse
Baltimore, Maryland
June 15, 3:57 a.m. EST
The big screen above Circe’s MindReader console flashed white and then was filled by the bland face of Mr. Church. Rudy saw Circe’s posture immediately stiffen and the muscles at the corners of her jaw tightened. He wondered if Church noticed it too. And if so, did he care.
“Let’s jump right in,” said Church. “Aunt Sallie tells me that you have problems with the content of the drive. Tell me.”
“First,” interrupted Rudy, “Is Joe okay?”
“He says so,” said Church.
“Yes, but
is
he?”
“I haven’t had time to personally give him a physical, Dr. Sanchez.”
Rudy held his ground. “I expect a more complete answer as soon as possible.”
“Noted,” Church said with a small twitch of his mouth.
“What do we know about the nukes?” said Circe.
Church smiled faintly. “Based on the photos Rasouli provided, they appear to be Teller–Ulams. We’re running extensive searches through intelligence agencies in thirty countries to see if we can get a line on who might have built them.”
“Can’t a person simply go online and download instructions for making them?” asked Rudy.
“You watch too many movies, Doctor. These are sophisticated and complex machines, and it takes a great deal of skill, the proper equipment, and genuine experts to do it right. From the photos it’s clear that the casings are commercially manufactured, or rather were during the Cold War. These casings are late 1980s, and less than five hundred of this design were made.”
“Five hundred?” echoed Rudy.
“A conservative estimate places the number of active nukes in the world at eight thousand,” said Circe.
“That estimate is very conservative,” said Church. “We know who bought this model openly or through standard military appropriations. We have decades of intelligence and, in some cases, mutual sharing of information. My guess is that we will find that most or all of those devices will be accounted for: still active, mothballed, or dismantled and the parts tracked. The problem is complicated by the fact that fifty-six of these devices were in the Republic of Kazakhstan, and after it became separated from Russia, we have not been able to verify the location or disposition of a third of those devices. This has become a typical, though increasingly frightening, state of affairs since the end of the Cold War.”
“There’s a second problem,” added Circe. “Most of the superpowers have many more devices than have ever appeared on inventories, because they do not want them counted. Nuclear arms limitations agreements, as well intentioned as they are, have driven some countries into policies of secrecy that are truly frightening.”
“So what does that mean for us?” asked Rudy. “In this case, I mean?”
“It should give us a few leads but we can’t count on it taking us directly to a source,” replied Circe. “Or to a buyer, if these things are black market items.”
“Exactly.” Church selected a Nilla wafer but did not take a bite. “This might—and I do mean
might
—help us eventually find the source of the bombs, but I’m not optimistic about that leading us to where all of the bombs currently are. We still only have probable locations on the first four. That kind of ferret work is time-consuming, and I doubt we have that kind of time. In the short term I am positioning our teams to move in and attempt to seize control of them and de-arm them.”
The word “attempt” hung in the air like a bad smell.
“And if we can’t?” asked Rudy.
“I have a number of experts working on developing various practical scenarios for how this could play out, including, unfortunately, a worst-case scenario.”
“Worst-case meaning what?” asked Rudy. “Tell me that your concern is the human population of the region and not the oil fields.”
Church said nothing, and his eyes were invisible behind his tinted glasses, but Rudy felt the impact of his stare.
“
Lo siento
,” Rudy said, and placed his hand over his heart and half bowed.
Church shook his head to erase the gaffe from the conversation. He turned to focus on Circe. “How are you coming along with a list of potential instigators?”
She sighed and shook her head. “We simply don’t have enough information to go on. We need to know more than we do or we’re shooting in the dark.”
“I agree,” said Church, nodding. “Now give me what you have.”
Circe told him about the concerns she and Bug had with the “damage” to the flash drive.
“I think we can all agree that Rasouli doctored it,” Church said with a cold little smile. “What else?”
“The
Book of Shadows
and the
Saladin Codex,
” said Rudy. “We’ve made some progress there.” They told him about the Voynich manuscript.
“Yes,” Church said, nodding. “I’ve heard of it. Have you been able to determine what it is, though? Voynich or the
Book of Shadows
?”
“Not so far,” admitted Circe. “I’ve been going through the research done at Yale, at U of P, and elsewhere, but it’s all theories. No one has cracked it yet.”
“And those two extra pages?”
Circe shrugged. “Dead end, so far.”
“What about the other book, the
Saladin Codex
? It’s my understanding that it’s an annotation and attempted refutation of
Al-Kit
ā
b al-mukhta
ş
ar f
ī
h
ī
s
ā
b al-
ğ
abr wa’l-muq
ā
bala
. Does that suggest anything?”
Circe nodded, translating the name slowly, tasting the words. “‘The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.’ Completion and balancing. Interesting.”
“I thought so, too,” said Church.
Rudy did not see the connection. “What does that suggest?”
“In terms of symbolism, it suggests a number of things,” said Circe. “The desire for a return to order. Or, in different terms, to the ‘correct’ and precise way things should be. In the current Middle East situation, there are several clashing interpretations for the ‘way things should be.’ The Jews say the Holy Land is theirs, and they can make a good argument for it, from their perspective based on the length of time during which they occupied those lands, the whole ‘chosen people’ thing. Then there’s the Christians who believe that the Holy Lands rightfully passed to them with the birth and, more significantly, the trial, execution, and resurrection of Jesus. Some groups actively believe that the Jews forfeited any rights to those lands when they brought Jesus to Pilate for trial.” She took a breath. “And Islam, though a comparatively younger religion, believes that God specifically handed over the lease for those lands to them through Mohammed. Since there have been Arab peoples there for thousands of years, they, too, can make a good claim for possession.”
“Not to mention the tensions ignited when the nation of Israel was founded,” said Church. “And the deepening crisis when oil was discovered under the sands.”
“Which brings in Europe and America,” said Rudy.
“And Asia. China and Japan are major clients of OPEC.”
“Balance,” mused Rudy sourly. “What about completion?”
“In this context,” said Church, “I find the word deeply troubling. It suggests an end to things. An endgame, perhaps.”
“Nukes would accomplish that,” said Circe.
“How?” asked Rudy. “Beyond simply blowing things up.”
“You know the saying ‘fire purifies’?” asked Circe. “If the oil fields were destroyed and the land laid waste by radiation, there could be no further conflict over there.”
“What are we discussing here?” asked Rudy with a crooked smile. “A doomsday cult?”
Circe wasn’t smiling.
“
Madre de Dios
,” breathed Rudy.
Chapter Fifty-Three
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 12:29 p.m.